At the End of Rainbow

OK, the century rolled over, and the world didn’t end. But it will, nevertheless.

“When you get right down to it and think carefully about it,” said Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Richard Danielpour in a recent phone interview from New Hampshire, “the end of the world is the day each of us leaves this mortal coil.”

Danielpour was speaking not about the Apocalypse, but about his new Pacific Symphony millennial piece, “The Night Rainbow,” which will receive its first performances, being billed as Millennium Gala Concerts, by the Santa Ana-based orchestra Friday and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Pacific music director Carl St.Clair had asked him for a work that was appropriate for the millennium because it would be the first music the orchestra would play in 2000.

“I started asking myself what is the significance of all of this hoopla of the end of the century and the end of the millennium,” Danielpour said.

“I started to think back to my childhood when people would march around New York City with placards around their necks, saying ‘Repent, the end is nigh . . .’

“When I went on to think further about it, I realized that the millennium is about death and birth, when you get right down to it.

“So I got very interested in the whole notion of near-death experiences. I started reading a lot about them. There is a wonderful book in which the character of near-death experiences is caught, the ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ [by Sogyal Rinpoche, HarperCollins, 1992].”

From those accounts and also “from a deep-seated intuition,” the composer said he believes there is something that continues after death.

“And as Einstein reiterated over and over, you cannot kill matter or energy, which is a very interesting thing to think about.

“So in a way, I fashioned this work as if it were the last day of an individual. It could be the last day or a near-death experience. I’m not going to say which. Let the listener judge for himself.”

The title of the new work comes from a Cooper Edens children’s book.

“It’s a beautiful book with illustrations, very innocent and childlike,” Danielpour said. “The last line is, ‘If you’re afraid of the dark, remember the night rainbow,’ which had a kind of resonance for me.

“In this piece, there’s a real part of what I sense happening in the world, a real polarity between surface existence, what we would call our lives and activity, and this inner life, which is something I think about a lot in my work, in all my work.”

The new piece lasts about 17 minutes. It falls into two parts, but there is no break between the two. The first is “very earth oriented, impulse oriented, very rhythmic and rhythmically driven.” The second is “very slow, a real adagio, very ‘air oriented,’ for lack of a better word.”

Though stories usually have a beginning, middle and end, Danielpour didn’t write them in that order.

“You very often get a sense of where you’re going to go in a piece by starting toward the end,” he said.

He made an analogy with Bach’s Cantata 78, in which each movement is a variation on a part of the final chorale. “The chorale comes at very end, revealing that’s what the whole piece was about,” the composer said.

Something similar happens in Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” in which an “eerie string chorale” is played continuously underneath this other music.

“The strings are always there,” Danielpour said, “as if the answer was always there under the trumpet, which asks the question.

“While everyone is busy doing the various things they’re doing, the real essence may be under one’s nose all the time and we might miss it. It’s like John Lennon’s line, ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.’ ”

Danielpour was speaking from an artists colony in New Hampshire, where he was working on a new piece for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the New York Philharmonic, to premiere in May.

“It’s winter here now,” Danielpour said. “I’ve only ever been here before during the summer. It’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. With all the leaves gone, I could see through everything.

“Before it was camouflaged by all this leafy-ness. Very similar. When all the accouterments fall away, you’re left with all there is. That’s what this piece is about--discovering about essences after all of the externals have fallen away.”

Danielpour’s music has been characterized as being very listener-friendly.

“I’m not interested in attempting to create something that someone will perceive as totally novel and never having been experienced before,” he said.

“Frankly, I think something revolutionary comes into existence--Stravinsky’s ‘Sacre’ or Gluck’s ‘Orfeo’--quite by accident, not by a composer intending to be a revolutionary, but by a composer being himself.”

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Richard Danielpour’s “The Night Rainbow” will be played by the Pacific Symphony led by Carl St.Clair at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The concerts will also include soprano Deborah Voigt singing works by Strauss and Verdi. $10-$50. (714) 556-2787.

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.