Program Note:

Rather than the delicious Vietnamese broth, this title refers to Potentially Hazardous Objects; that is, asteroids or comets with orbits dangerously close to Earth and large enough to cause significant damge upon impact. A broader view of PHOs in our sky might include ballistic missiles or as we know too well, airplanes. One can imagine many different perspectives on objects hurtling through the sky or deep space, from a largely imaginary close-up view of a fiery machine or threatening asteroid, to a distant gaze during night of a meteor shower or in late afternoon of the gradually disintegrating contrails left by airliners criss-crossing an otherwise blue sky. In 1860, Walt Whitman wrote about a "year of meteors," concluding the poem with lines likely inspired by both the Great Comet of 1860 and a rare occurence the same year of a "meteor procession" – a phenomenon when a meteor grazes the Earth’s atmosphere and fragments into smaller meteors all traveling in the same path. (The latter is depicted in a contemporaneous painting by Hudsun valley artist Frederick Edwin Church.)

... Nor the comet that came unannounced, out of the north, flaring in heaven, Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads, (A moment, a moment long, it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;) —Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would I gleam and patch these chants; Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good! year of forebodings! year of the youth I love! Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo! even here, one equally transient and strange! As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this book, What am I myself but one of your meteors?

Whitman references the tension of the times; earlier, he notes ships arriving in New York, some with immigrants, some with gold; all, amid the unrest prior to the Civil War. Comparing himself to a meteor at the poem's end suggests our rapid flight through life. Somehow, many of these elements have an unfortunate and timely relevance. Our country and world are threatened by conflicting forces and ideologies and an ever-increasing number of PHOs, both cosmic and earthly. With my music, I don't pretend to specifically describe, let alone propose solutions to, our political and social turmoil; rather, this piece tries to find an abstract beauty in examination of aspects of these various phenomena traveling through space and time. The score begins with the performance suggestion: "dangerously fast; transient and strange – of unearthly light..."

David Dzubay (November 2018)