Composer: Margaret Goldston
Series: Legacy Series
Instrumentation: Piano Solos
Level: Intermediate to Early Advanced
Key: Various
Time Signature: Various
Style/Character: Lyrical, Expressive, Virtuosic
Concepts: glissandos, cadenza, theme and variations
Page Count: Music 32, Total 40
Printing Suggestion: Booklet on tabloid paper, double-sided, stapled
Released: 2023
Additional Info: Circa 1990.  Land of the Midnight Sun is a journey through the scenes of Alaska. The title refers to the long days in summer months above the Arctic Circle, when the sun can still be seen at midnight. Margaret contemplated naming the collection Alyeska, the Aleut word for Alaska, meaning “great land of white to the east” or “mainland.” (The Aleutian Islands are west of mainland Alaska.)

Publishing this collection has been a painstaking but rewarding process. Multiple revisions exist of each piece—mainly changes of expressive and editorial markings, not of notes or rhythms. Great care has been taken to compare the multiple versions of each piece, including comparisons to Margaret’s recordings of some of the compositions (which can be found on YouTube). Margaret handwrote all her manuscripts, which are very neat, beautiful, and cleanly notated.

These pieces were composed around 1990. (Interestingly, they are some of the few pieces that Margaret marked with dates.) She performed some of the set in 1991 in a lecture recital at Louisiana State University, where she was being honored as alumnus of the year for the school of music. (Some of the YouTube recordings are from her performance.) When she composed these pieces, she had not yet visited Alaska; however, she did some years later, giving teacher workshops on one trip and returning on vacation with her husband after that. Margaret considered these pieces to be the pinnacle of her work.

Titles include:

Dogsled Derby
Frozen Sea
An Arctic Village
Island of Seals
Northern Lights
Tune of the Trapper
Chinook
Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes (Theme and Variations)
Dances of Katmai [Epilogue]