Searching Deep

for SATB a cappella choir
(2018)

The score of Searching Deep can be purchased from Sheet Music Plus.
A recorded performance can be heard on YouTube.

This piece is based on a poem about a photograph called the “Hubble Deep Field”. The image was made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope pointing at a seemingly black and empty piece of space, then taking time exposures lasting many days. What the photo shows are ancient galaxies that existed in the universe billions of years ago. They are so far away that their light is only now reaching the telescope – millions, even billions of years after all their stars have died. In other words, while we see nothing in that piece of sky, the telescope can still see what used to be there. In the end, of course, we will never truly know what, if anything, is still there. We can only stare into “empty” black space and imagine...

(performance time ca. 4' 20")