Parhelia

Parhelia
Parhelia, or sun dogs, is an optical phenomenon in very cold climates, where hexagonal ice crystals making up the cirrus or cirrostratus clouds refract light, creating a halo around the sun. The most visible portions of the ring are usually two bright spots on its sides. I was getting ready to move to Hawai'i when starting this piece, and wondered what it would be like to see parhelia in Honolulu. Even though the locals later told me that "green flash" can sometimes be observed at sunset, the temperature never drops nearly enough for ice crystals to form. I thus wanted to partly depict a paradoxical world, where parhelia would appear on a pleasant tropical day and no one would think twice about it. Such environment would require a completely different set of physical properties, in a dimension different from ours. The second seed of the work is my desire to write something less "pianistic," where the complexity of perations is highly reduced and the instrument is used as a big resonator box. The third is a sense of urgency and flux we would perceive in a new, alien world, which is as strange as can be yet everything happens as naturally as in our own. The two opening electronic samples are recordings of a rainy beach in Vietnam, and dragged bamboo in Nepal, downloaded from quietamerican.org. The ending sample is a Javanese gamelan rehearsal from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.