Aspects of Radiance:

Last summer, while reading The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, I was struck by this passage:

“They stayed for rapt moments in the crystal sphere of this soul, as if in a realm of invisible radiation, listening to unearthly music, and they returned to their daily lives with hearts cleansed and strengthened, as if descending from a high mountain peak.”

The thought of creating a  ‘realm of invisible radiation’, an ‘unearthly music’, while possibly not entirely realisable in this earth-bound context, was a profound imaginative stimulus…

Shortly after completing the piece I came upon these words, powerfully suggestive of the musical ideas in Aspects of Radiance, while reading Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.