Update Title: F1C73390-7500-4805-A7A5-9A2F47ECC47B

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There comes, I believe, a clarity with the cold and sharp winters of the north.  There is a sure and certain advantage to those of us who live in these places and who believe in the winter's ability to grant insight and make vivid the outlines of what we can make of our lives.
The title of my overture makes a reference to the "northern lights," or the "aurora borealis."  It is a slantwise reference, and I didn't begin the composing of this music with a notion that I should describe these in music.  It seems to me that if this music is about anything at all, it is an essay about the crystalline clarity that cold can bring and about the quality of light on those winter days of vivid sun and blinding snow.
There is a wonderful passage that I read after most of the music was written.  It is from the diary of Maria Mitchell, who was an American astronomer and among the earliest of women in this field.
"We know a few things which once were hidden, and being known they seem easy; but there are the flashings of the Northern lights...there is the conical zodiacal beam seen so beautifully in the early evenings of spring and the early mornings of autumn:  there are the startling comets, whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and flickering variable stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric  showers-and for all these the reasons are as clear as for the succession of the day and the night; they lie just beyond the daily mist of minds, but our eyes have not pierced through it."
About eight minutes long, Northern Light was commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra for the 1997--98 season in celebration of its 75th Anniversary.  The orchestration calls for woodwinds in pairs, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, two percussionists, and strings.  Structurally, the music is built as an arch, with a return at the end of the music from the beginning, a second section of fast music which is found before the last part, and a central section that is built from sustained melodic lines in the lower register of the orchestra.

-David Liptak

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"In Liptak's Northern Light, Bay revealed the beauties of a Stravinsky-esque ballet; transparent textures, incisive rhythms, shimmering lightness despite the large orchestra. Commissioned for the RPO's 75th year, the eight-minute overture ... forecast the evening's festive spirit and music-making."
--Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

"David Liptak's Northern Light was Impressionistic pointillism in music--delicate points of instrumental color brightening a larger skyscape...LiptakÕs complex layers swirled seamlessly around each other, shifting dramatically from light to dark. Colors darted in and out like fireflies." 
-Sharon McDaniel, --Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

"I liked [David Liptak's Northern Light] the first time around, and even more the second. It is simply constructed and lucidly, sometimes luminously scored: propulsively rhythmic opening and closing sections recalling Stravinsky's Symphony in C surround a brief, mysterious slow section. Best of all is Northern Light's coda, in which the music briefly and simply dissolved: an effect perfectly timed by the composer..." --David Raymond, CITY

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