Jennifer Higdon Light

Jennifer Higdon Light Program Notes

Light was commissioned by the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra through their Meet-the-Composer/League of American Orchestras residency, and dedicated to their then music director, Bridget Reischl. During 2006-07, the orchestra was to perform four of Higdon’s works, with Light to be newly-composed during the residency. (Parallel to composing her own work, Higdon mentored a group of students from the Green Bay Youth Symphony, also composing orchestral works.) Originally, Light was to be a brass fanfare concert-opener, but Higdon expanded it into an orchestral work, and it was premiered in a later season. As Higdon described it in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview during her residency, it’s inspiration was both the light an orchestra brings to its community, and a poem by Wisconsin’s first Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort (1936- 2015, served 2000-04), who came from the Appleton/Green Bay area and wrote deeply observational poems such as her

1994 work If Death Were a Woman.

Jennifer Higdon Born: December 31, 1962 (age 55 years), Brooklyn, New York City, NY