for orchestra, synthesizers and drums


1986

Devil’s Golf Course was commissioned by the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra and the NUMUS Festival with support from the Danish Art Council and premiered at the NUMUS Festival in 1988. The title refers to an area formed by several dry lakes in Death Valley, California, where temperatures reach 140° F in the summer. The area called Devil’s Golf Course consists of 95% pure salt about 1000 feet thick, spanning an area of 200 square miles. The music is inspired by a powerful experience in this place, where the heat and light reflected by the salt are even more overwhelming than the enormous heat and blinding light that beat down from the sky, and where all of one’s senses are overloaded by the oven-like heat and the sound of one’s own footsteps crunching on the strange salt formations that reach into infinity in all directions.

Available on CD: http://www.dacapo-records.dk/recording-devil-s-golf-course.aspx

Download programme note as PDF: Devil’s Golf Course