San Antonio College Library

"Born at the close of World War II, 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano was a young man in his twenties when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene with these three brilliant, angry novels about the wartime Occupation of Paris. The epigraph to his first novel, among the first to seriously question Nazi collaboration in France, reads: "In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'Étoile?'...

Commissioned to celebrate the bicentenary of the United States Declaration of Independence, this was inspired by the composer's tours around Utah's magnificent landscapes, including Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks, which so affected him with their beauty. This is no musical tourism however: the work takes the listener upwards, from the depths of the canyons, to the songs of birds, to outer space, and ultimately to the Celestial City.