Commissioned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th anniversary as music director, with the generous support of Scott Bieler, City of Light is a tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination, whether it be the hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of one “City of Light,” Buffalo, or the crackling synapses of an Einstein’s mind — the surging intellectual and philosophical power of secular humanist insights first ginned up in another “Ville-Lumière,” Enlightenment-era Paris, or the spiritual illumination suffusing the Sufi mystic Rumi — the light that makes the shadows plain in Plato’s cave or the lightning that struck the key hanging from Benjamin Franklin’s kite — the spiritual essence of animism or the energy that powers the execution of the code sending ones and zeros back to us from the Voyager spacecraft — or the “subtle electric fire” that compels our hearts to beat.
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