PROGR AM NOTES
page 18
JEREMY LAMB born: September 22, 1981 in Apex, North Carolina
A Ride on 'Oumuamua (2022) orchestral premiere: May 17, 2024 in Charlotte, NC
approx. duration: 12 minutes
'Oumuamua is Hawaiian for "first reach out" and it was the name given to the unusual, pancake-shaped object that floated through our Solar System in late 2017. It caught the public's attention partly due to being the first interstellar object ever observed, but it also became famous because of its strange shape and the mysterious acceleration it made after passing by the sun. Many scientists, including the notable Harvard professor Avi Loeb, began serious discussions about its nature. Perhaps it wasn't a rock at all; perhaps it was an object of alien manufacture? As interested as I was in the swirling debate, what really inspired me for this piece was a little fact I came across one evening: 'Oumuamua had come from an area of sky that contained almost nothing, which meant it had been traveling for billions of years in absolute silence and then — suddenly — it appeared within a stone's throw of our beautiful planet Earth. In less than a month, 'Oumuamua was already gone, hurtling into another vast emptiness perhaps even larger than the one it had come from. To me, that sounded almost as magical as it did tragic. A Ride on 'Oumuamua is a fantastical journey I composed with the hopes of conveying some of the awe I felt from imagining its long and lonely voyage. I wrote a few lines to better give you an idea of the narrative I had in mind:
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