MoM II - Hesperus is Phosphorus

A world premiere collaboration with Network for New Music. we are thrilled to have 2002 Pulitzer-prize winner Lewis Spratlan composing a concert-length work for us. Hesperus is Phosphorus will loosely take the form of a kind of secular vespers – a passage, or crossing, through the philosophical and spiritual canyons of our time; drawing on the words of American poets, playwrights, and physicists, Spratlan’s music explores growth and loss in our ever-expanding world of discovery.

Hesperus, or Vesper - the evening star - was thought by the ancient Greeks to be distinct from Phosphorus, the morning star. Eventually accepting the Babylonian belief that these were in fact one and the same, the Greeks lost two stars but gained another: a moving star (our planet Venus), a "greater god," and a change in faith. Thus, through discovery, gain is accompanied by loss - a condition familiar to the modern world as we look back through these same stars, seeing truths we had previously thought beyond our knowledge.