Homage to O'Keeffe

This four-movement composition contains musical interpretations of four of Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings. The score prints on legal size paper and the parts on letter. I. From the Faraway Nearby The highly charged contrast of closely viewed foreground details and hugely distant horizons, which typified the New Mexican Views of O'Keeffe, was not a mere optical illusion. The large scale, bright light, and clear air of the region permitted one to see for the proverbial "forever," and the juxtaposition of faraway and nearby was an integral aspect of desert vision. Soft dynamics and orchestration represent the faraway while the loud dynamics and orchestration represent the nearby. Near the end, the faraway and nearby begin to merge. II. Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 This painting depicts one of O'Keeffe's favorite subjects: a magnified flower. To her, the delicate blooms stood as some of the most overlooked pieces of naturally occurring beauty, objects that the bustling contemporary world ignored. So she made it her mission to highlight their complex structures, explaining: "When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not." This movement is slow and lyrical reflecting the beauty of the close-up image. III. Red Hills and Bone O'Keeffe 's most effective composition of bones in the landscape appeared in 1941, with Red Hills and Bone; the large canvas is also among her most ambitions evocations of the arid country of which she was by then an owner, having purchase the house at Ghost Ranch the preceding year. In 1939, O'Keeffe had written of the bones as "strangely more living than the animals walking around," and in the 1941 painting her response is given visual from. The minimalistic noodling represents the red hills and the bold triplets represent the mystique of the bone. IV. Ladder to the Moon This painting shows a handmade wooden ladder suspended in the turquoise sky. In the background are the pitch-black Pedernal Mountains and a pearl colored half moon. This painting was very similar to a picture taken of O'Keeffe and her surroundings at Ghost Ranch. In the picture, a large wooden ladder is leaned against an outer wall of a patio from where it rises up into the sky with the Pedernal Mountains in the background. In Pueblo culture the ladder is used to symbolize the link between the Pueblos and cosmic forces. The fact that the ladder is pointed up in the sky may represent the link between nature and the cosmos. While there are motifs that depict specifics of the painting, such as the scale-wise ascending and descending figure for the crescent mood and rising arpeggios for the ladder, the focus of this movement is the spiritual element. The music rises and grows in intensity from a ground bass-like theme to a soaring ending.