Chance played a significant part in the genesis of Mark Emney's Dark Star, the piece that received its first performance in outer space, aboard the Columbia space shuttle STS 93 in 1997. The music had materialized the summer before after a chance meeting with the Kazakh violinist Bisengaliev who agreed to be a part of the project. Emney was working on music production for Channel 4/PBS in Houston at the time. So a demo CD was given to astronaut Kady Coleman, and off it went into space.
[watch and listen to a sequence from the Dark Star CD ROM Video using the player below -- needs an
Apple Quicktime plugin --
high speed connection preferred].
The first earth-bound performance in January 2004, with Bisengaliev, was part of the closing concert of the Uralsk Violin Competition in Kazakhstan. The three tracks on this CD are of the original sketches (as played on the Columbia mission), the 2004 orchestral version, and with the CD Rom images. The story is more interesting than what is admittedly very effective film music
[listen -- track 1, 2:40-3:30].
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