Meteora

Meteora is a piece about love across the stars and longing across time and space. Its name comes from the ancient Greek metéōros, which means ‘suspended in air’.

When I was asked to write a piece about love, my mind immediately drifted upwards to the sky – perhaps because of the idiom ‘written in the stars’. I’ve always been quite fascinated by things that feel cosmically fated or destined.

 I think from the outset, I wanted to resist the impulse to write about closeness or sharing space – instead, I was keen to musically imagine the strange intimacy of long-distance relationships. After several pandemic-affected years, none of us are strangers to the feeling of relationships at a distance.

I started to think about the hope and fantasy of imagining someone looking up at the sky at the same time as you, and to ponder that they might be imagining you doing the same. It is this image that forms the basis of this piece – the world turning, but two people standing still on opposite ends of it, looking up at exactly the same time. There is a strange simultaneity to this image: it is held entirely in an act of circular imagination and longing – of course there is no way of knowing for sure that somebody else is thinking of you while you are thinking of them. 

 The piece uses celestial metaphors to explore the sense of being strangely fated or cosmically linked, but far away. It shifts between a sense of intrepid searching (‘navigate by the stars to find me’); moments of celestial vastness; and passages of intense, blazing feeling. It also includes moments of intimacy – a love duet between tenor and bass soloists – to contrast this vastness.

I wanted to make the feeling of longing for someone far away feel elemental and suspended in the air.