Joseph Sowa draws on diverse influences—from linguistics to plainchant to American football—to create music focused on detailed textures and vivid colors. His music has been performed by professionals and amateurs alike, including groups such as Hub New Music, Collage New Music, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Genesis Chamber Singers, the Ludovico Ensemble the PRISM Quartet, and middle schools and high schools across North America. The founder of the Wizarding School for Composers, Sowa has received awards from ASCAP, the American Prize and the Barlow Endowment, and he holds a doctorate in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University. 

 

Composer’s Note: Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars was inspired by two poems. The first, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman, expresses how experience can be so much more stirring than facts:

 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

 

The second, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, fleshed out that image from Whitman and inspired my piece’s title: “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way, / …Ten thousand saw I at a glance.”

The piece seeks to capture the wonder of staring into the star-filled sky on a dark summer night: the adventure of driving up into the canyon, the stillness of watching the stars come out in silence, and the excitement of being connected to nature.