Souvenir of Triton (1990)

The composer writes: Souvenir of Triton (1990) is composed in the tradition of the 19th-century souvenir piece, intended to evoke the memory of a place. However, there is an obvious irony here: this piece recalls a place no person has ever visited.

Triton, the largest of the planet Neptune’s moons, was discovered by the astronomer William Lassell in 1846. However, little was known about Triton until August 1989, when the space probe Voyager 2 passed close to Neptune and transmitted information on the planet and its satellites back to Earth. This information revealed Triton to be surely one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system, with a thin atmosphere comprised of nitrogen and methane, and a surface temperature of approximately -200C degrees. Also discovered on Triton were “volcanoes” through which liquid nitrogen is forced up to the surface from an estimated depth of 20 kilometres.