About this Piece

One morning on a visit to Los Angeles, I hiked up the hill to Griffith Observatory, to clear my head before returning to work on this piece for orchestra. I looked down at the city with all its curving road patterns, and up at the sky, which has been observed and wondered about since the beginning of consciousness. I had been thinking about my friend Kendrick Smith, a cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute who is at the cutting edge of the ancient tradition of stargazing. Kendrick constructs new conceptual frameworks for analyzing data collected by the CHIME radio telescope—developing ways of looking at ways of looking at ways of looking at nn(ways of looking at) the universe. (Maybe that is also what music can be.) There was something about writing for a full symphony orchestra that had made me think about sci-fi films. I love the way epic tales of the beyond can zoom in and out, using imagined alternative universes to tell stories about ourselves on multiple scales at once. And I love how music in these films carves and colors our attention to those worlds (in their various permutations).  

The Observatory features some very large chords, and some very large spaces. Motives appear in diminution and augmentation simultaneously, like objects in orbit at different phases. Patterns in the foreground occasionally yield to patterns hovering in the background (including brief references to Strauss’ Don Juan, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1, and to the arpeggios played on chimes to summon audiences to their seats at formal orchestra concerts). There is celebration and criticism of systems, amid moments of chaos and of clarity. The very large chords return at the end, but their behavior is not the same as when we began. 

I’d like to dedicate The Observatory to Xian Zhang, the brilliant conductor who premiered this work, and whose generosity, wisdom, and energy is something that I aspire to in my own life in music. —Caroline Shaw