Constellations by Ghost of the Sound Orchestra

Seventeen years in the making, this piece of music is unusual in a few ways. The initial compositional idea first entered the composer's mind in 2005, at the instant his forehead was struck by a single snowflake in the Uintah mountains of Utah on an otherwise sweltering day. The idea was to turn the night sky into music by creating melodies which reflected the physical arrangements of the constellations themselves.

Since, it has traveled from paper sketches on staff paper, through a series of advancing computers and audio processing systems, until a development environment was finally found that could adequately support this sizeable construction, both in terms of computational power and the abilities of virtual instrumentation to produce more lifelike performances.

Across the 12 major and 11 minor pieces, you'll find melodies which are derived and translated, more or less faithfully, from the spatial layout of the constellations for which they're named. On top of this strange conception, the arrangement includes a full symphonic orchestra and a rock band, and strives to make the resulting partnership more equal than it has been before.

Then, interwoven into the arrangement and composition itself is the composer's own musical style, which is an eclectic survey of idioms reaching from romantic Western Classical, through funk and progressive rock, and into experimental frontiers where the old and new find syntheses. Like the constellations and their real arrangements, you'll find these melodies sometimes sweet and familiar, sometimes angular and forbidding. Much time has gone into two things - making them true, and trying to make them beautiful, too.

So journey inwards, dear listener, if you dare. Take a trip across the Northern Hemisphere, the real space and time of one calendar year rushing beneath you over the course of a mere hour.

Jared Menard is an orchestral composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer living in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, USA.

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