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Between Worlds was commissioned by a consortium of bassoonists led by Joseph Swift. Each of the three movements explores the idea of a liminal space—the space between things. The first movement, Insomniac Loops, wanders between waking and sleeping. The second movement, Trace, is for my son Declan (age 8 while writing this piece). One of my favorite moments each day is tucking him in at night, when we have a chance to talk and cuddle. He often shares some of his thoughts from the day, and I get a chance to connect with one of my favorite people in the world. To help him fall asleep, we developed a routine of “finger breathing,” where I gently trace his fingers with mine. I also think of tracing as a metaphor: raising a child is an incredible opportunity to teach and to model—they so often walk in our footsteps, literally and figuratively—but they also depart from us in important ways, especially as they grow older and develop a clear sense of themselves. I imagine the bassoon and piano kind of carefully tracing each other. As the music develops, each voice is rendered more and more independent from the other—yet still connected, intertwined—in a beautiful dance. I also think of the third movement, Crackle, as a metaphor in multiple ways. I was reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, which explores the mysteries of time through the lens of physics. The worlds beyond our senses are strange—from the smallest, mysterious quantum world to the vast expanses of the universe—with time moving in ways that seem counterintuitive to our everyday experience. In Crackle, I imagine time moving at different rates, being bent and refracted through space, and folded in on itself. This music is more episodic and twitchy than the preceding movements, and it is woven together with references to the rhythmic energy and dark timbres of heavy metal.