By Julio Zúñiga
This piece is a kind of tone poem. It sets the following verses of a song I really like to music:
“I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
[…]
I felt the earth move in my hand
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
[…]
And I knew our joy would fill the earth”
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face appears in log entry number 08 12 57 10 of NASA History Division’s “Chronology of Wakeup Calls” as wake-up music for the astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 mission the morning of December 15, 1972. This was the last day in lunar orbit of the most recent lunar landing mission. The spacecraft landed on the moon on Monday, December 11, in the Taurus-Littrow region.
On Monday, October 18, 2021, I woke up before dawn to record the sounds of the sea along the Pacific Coast near my hometown. The tide was low that morning and the beach endless. The air was exceptionally still as water slowly came to fill the earth.
