Polar Dawn by DAVID LIDOV

Polar Dawn 2000
A 2½-minute piece shouldn’t need a long note, but I must mention several people. Ron Silver asked for this contribution to his project of capturing on film the first dawn in Canada’s arctic for the year 2000. I received the print of his photo in exchange.

The brilliant, starry sky of the round-the-clock night is gradually obscured by lengthening twilight, and on February 24 the edge of the sun is visible for the first time, the first day of the year that the whole country is illuminated by daylight. I wrote an arm-chair score far from the cold scene (in Haiti, in December) calling for a mini-arsenal of technologies which I didn’t know and which the prospective sunrise (absolutely not to be postponed) gave me no time to learn. This production depended on:

Kim Chow Morris, flute; Sharon Tiesson, cello; Rob Wannamaker, computer generated drone; Paul Swoger-Ruston, guitar (performance and tuning system) and audio engineering; Mike Kane, audio engineering.

My print of the arctic photo is 3 feet by 4 feet. The thumb print you see here hardly conveys the effect, but Bandcamp wants some "art" so it seemed worth a try.

My thanks to all the above, D.L.

I was born in the US in Portland, OR but left earlier than I might remember for Chicago. From 1948 to 1953, I lived at the foot of the Colorado Rockies. At the end of 1965, I moved from NYC to Canada. We lived in Montreal until 1970, when I got a job at York University. Still in Toronto and Toronto keeps getting more interesting.