Luminous

​Duration: 

4'

​Instrumentation: ​

Solo Piano

​Instrumentation: ​​

UBC Composition/Piano Studio Collaborative Concert
March, 2018
​Roy Barnett Recital Hall,
​Vancouver, BC, Canada

​Year of Composition: ​

2018

Though I wrote Luminous in January of 2018, the piece was inspired by a trip to Croatia that I had taken the previous Summer. While in Milna for a two-week composition workshop, on our last night, all of the participants went out into the bay at midnight to swim with bioluminescent creatures. Inspired by this memory, Luminous, became a tone-poem for solo piano that illustrates the sensation of floating in an iridescent midnight sea, observing the awe-inspiring beauty and accompanying peace attached to that singular moment. 

In 2019, I also wrote a poem describing the same memory: 

Obsidian stillness;
Wafting breezes skimming glassy water,
floating on the edge of the world;
Illumination triggered by sensory
motion as if stars and silk had
merged
occupying the quiet spaces between,
levitating within the peace of
isolated blankness,
isolated stillness,
remembering that all you ever have been or ever might be
will not succinctly drown in more nefarious waters and
obsidian stillness.

Carolyn Quick · Luminous (2018)