Non Sequitur Music Publishing: Small Blue Marble

Small Blue Marble

Play Small Blue Marble, as performed live
by the Enso Quartet.

Composer: David Heuser
Instrumentation: String Quartet (2 violins, viola, cello)
Year Composed: 2004
Duration:17 minutes
Pages (score): 34
Cost: Purchase: $30.00

Sample score pages are available for this piece.
Click here for a PDF file of the first six pages of the score.

Representative Performances:

Amy Ventricinque, Mary Ellen Goree, Allyson Dawkins, Marilyn de Oliveira, Composers Alliance of San Antonio Concert, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (April 2006)
The Enso String Quartet, Society of Composers, Inc. Region VI Conference, Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, Houston, Texas (February 2006)

Reviews:

Performance by Mary Ellen Goree & Amy Venticinque (violins), Allyson Dawkins (viola), and Marilyn de Oliveira, (cello), reviewed by Mike Greenburg, writing in the San Antonio Express-News (May 2006):

"Restless, craggy music in the Bartok line alternates with gently lyrical sections to portray this humane work's imaginary circling of the globe."

Program Notes:

The initial inspirations for Small Blue Marble were a picture and a dream. The picture is the famous image of the Earth as seen from the moon by the Apollo astronauts, an image of a small planet hanging vulnerably in the darkness of space. The work begins with this image, with a cold, sustained chord of outer space, but at its core, the piece is a travelogue for the planet inspired by a dream of flying toward the Earth, entering its atmosphere (the first rhythm of the piece – the breath of life), and proceeding around the globe, flying fast over land, maybe 50 feet off the ground, fields and mountains and all, plunging into the sea, crossing one ocean, coming back again to land on the other side of the globe, picking up more speed, and finally coming back to water, but this time falling slowly into the ocean’s deepest depths. Here, at the end, in another world without air, the opening music returns to draw the parallel between deep space and the deep sea. We live on a cracker between these two inhospitable worlds, an even more fragile situation than the picture which inspired this piece presents.

Non Sequitur Music Publishing
2112 Ontario Street
Bellingham, WA 98229
USA
(360) 733-7145
Email: nsm@nonsequiturmusic.com