Inspiration
Hubbard's To the Stars depicts a future where an interstellar ship travelling at near light speed slows down time experienced for its occupants. The ship's members are affected by Albert Einstein's time dilation theory, and the Earth experiences hundreds of years while only a few days have passed for members of the ship. The crew have no family or friends on Earth due to the time that separates them. Of the album's 17 tracks, 10 are directly based on characters or concepts from the book. The protagonist of the book (scientist Alan Corday), the ship's captain (Captain Jocelyn), and the ship's name (Hound of Heaven) are all titles of tracks on the album. The other seven tracks are "Port Views", short musical interludes between the larger pieces.
Corea explains at his website how he was motivated to work on music inspired by To the Stars, commenting that he was inspired by a scene from the book in which Hubbard describes the Captain of the spaceship in the story playing a melody on a piano. He had read the book eight or nine times, and after writing down musical composition based on Hubbard's work the album was created as a tone poem piece. Previous tone poem albums by Corea include The Leprechaun (1975), My Spanish Heart (1976), and The Mad Hatter (1978). The piece is Corea's first attempt at musical interpretation from one of Hubbard's works.
"The attraction to me was not only the challenge of writing music portraying characters in a fiction book but the fact that I've had such an intimate connection with L. Ron Hubbard and his work in Scientology for 40 years now. I've been a fan of his fiction for 25 years, and once I started into the act of working with his creations, it had an extra special excitement to me," he said in an interview with The Washington Post. "Aside from the content in his message, and the fact that he's the founder of the Church of Scientology and Dianetics, the thing I loved about Hubbard was the aesthetics of his writing. There is a musical wavelength to what he does," said Corea to The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Read more about this topic: To The Stars (album)
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