Program Note

Ultravioleta is a piece with four continuous movements that explore the ghostlike musical residue of two sounds colliding in the environment. When instruments play, there is a predictable harmony, but there are other sounds and interactions that lie just out of reach of our natural hearing that can be harnessed and made audible digitally. I was very much inspired by the magnetic playing and compositions of Steve Lehman, whose snaky saxophone lines are pretty much always running through my head.

This piece takes its name and its themes from a poetic novel written in 2006 by Laura Moriarty (writer and former director of SPD/Small Press Distribution, an important distributor for independent press)—not to be confused with another American novelist with the same name!

The story is a galactic travelog set in a future where information is everything, and the Ultravioleta, a ship made of paper (maybe the very pages that we are holding while reading the book) embarks in search of new communication beyond words.

Ultravioleta was written at the cusp of the creeping pervasiveness of artificial intelligence that we now live in. Its characters are fragments of information that—working together—could define the entire universe but alone are trivial, flashes of genius without history, context or development. – Joshua Rubin