Kolmanskop

Kolmanskop is a ghost town, located in a desert near the coast of Namibia. A German diamond mining settlement until its abandonment in the 1950's, the surrounding sands have filled the homes. The first time I came across pictures of Kolmanskop, I was awestruck by the beauty and strangeness of the place. The photographs looked like surrealist art, with mountains of sand, sometimes to the tops of doorways and roofs, inundating ornate colonial houses.

In 2014, I was awarded the W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College to go to Kolmanskop and compose a piece based on that setting. I spent countless hours sitting in the houses last April with blank staff paper and a pencil, sketching out a plan for the piece. In the end, I wanted to represent morethan just the visual elements of Kolmanskop. I tried to depict the idea of decay as the sand fills the houses, the sense of loss and nostalgia as the structures fade away, and the passage of time. The whole town is a bit like an hourglass--the more time that passes, the higher the sand becomes. I found a violin in one of the houses behind a glass case, apparently made by a violin-maker in Kolmanskop at the turn of the century. It was strange to know that in these eerily silent buildings there had once been music, and I decided to represent that with a recurring offstage violin solo. As the violin plays, it is often hidden by walls of sound, struggling to be heard above the orchestra.

This piece is written in memory of my teacher, Steven Stucky. He and I had many discussions about time, loss and how those themes could be represented through music, and those discussions took on new meaning after his sudden death in February of 2016. I want to thank him, as well as John Corigliano, Samuel Adler, and Harold Meltzer for their guidance on the piece.