Blast Off! (musical composition)
Blast Off! is a 10-minute classical composition for narrator and orchestra, with music and narrator’s script by American composer Daniel Dorff. The work was conceived in December 1999 by Daniel Hege, then music director of the Haddonfield Symphony (now Symphony in C), in response to the orchestra’s underwriter Lockheed Martin Information Technology suggesting such a work, to be narrated by retired astronaut Kenneth S. Reightler Jr.. Hege proposed the work and its scenario to Dorff, the orchestra’s composer-in-residence (1996 through 2015) along with a scheduled premiere date of March 31, 2000. Dorff created a narrator’s part that only spoke over rests or fermatas, to facilitate performance by narrators who don’t read music. The storyline is a journey to space, vetted by Reightler for accuracy in describing the astronauts’ experience during liftoff and space travel.
To engage young listeners, the narration is written in the second person rather than the first person or third person more typical of storytelling. The script begins “Have you ever looked up at a bright, shiny, full moon?”.[1], and it includes a participation segment in which the audience delivers the countdown to the launch [2]
Blast Off! has been performed by ensembles ranging from the Philadelphia Orchestra (October 14, 2003) through student and community groups, with narrators including actors, storytellers, the composer himself, and astronauts Kenneth S. Reightler Jr., Daniel Brandenstein, and Cynthia Osterhus. A commercial recording [3] of the work by Symphony in C conducted by Rossen Milanov is narrated by Ukee Washington, a celebrated TV news anchor in Philadelphia (and cousin of Denzel Washington).
The musical work, frequently performed at family- and school-oriented concerts, takes advantage of its episodic storyline to illustrate the sounds of each orchestral family. The brass section is featured to depict the blazing sun, the woodwind section presents imaginary Martians scurrying, glockenspiel and xylophone are featured as twinkling stars, and the string section with special glissando pizzicato effects illustrates the slow bouncing of humans walking on the moon with reduced gravity.
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