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.
bassoon
Kairos
2020 was a strange and difficult year. The loneliness of time in quarantine was unlike anything I have experienced. Time seemed to travel differently, perhaps more slowly at times and at other times more quickly—its arrow seemed jagged, bent, and off course. Kairos is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment. It is a different kind of time than Chronos, which is our more conscious and common understanding of time, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so forth. In the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy Kairos describes the intersection of the Liturgy with the Infinite—with God. An integral aesthetic principle of cathedrals is an attempt to sonically connect with something massive, something larger than ourselves—the Infinite. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University, writing about the Hagia Sophia (built in 537 as the largest Christian Church in the Byzantine Empire), translates a 6th-century description of the building by Paul the Silentiary in this way: “human action…brings into presence the divine reaction, the divine voice…in a sense that is the reverberation of the space: After the human voice stops singing, the building continues.”[1]
Many concert halls share a similar sonic aesthetic principle. I missed these spaces. I missed the resonance of concert halls and churches. I missed the energy and excitement when people gather together and can not only hear but also feel the air molecules moving around them, and they can see how and why and by whom these sounds are made. I missed the way in which these spaces activate sound waves, sending them bouncing frenetically from wall to wall, arch to edge, and then gently dissolve—each molecule hitting another, each collision becoming slightly less energized than the last until only a shadow of the sound remains. Then, even the shadow disappears, and profound silence inevitably crawls out of the cracks and crevices of these cavernous spaces and becomes a fast and fizzy flood, a cool, fresh bedsheet of air molecules draped over us. We feel the heaviness of sound in its sudden absence. Its weight in the silence. And then we remember the silence before sound. It was a different silence. It felt different. Or maybe we felt different?
I missed simply sharing these spaces—these experiences—with other people. With friends. With family. With acquaintances. With strangers. There is something very special about sharing sound in a particular time and place. This piece is my humble attempt to weave the threads of these ideas and of our disconnected realities into a single strand—a shared moment—and to sing a space—our time and space—into resonance.
[1] New York Times, August 6, 2020, “How a Historian Stuffed Hagia Sophia’s Sound Into a Studio”
Refraction
Program Note:
Refraction was commissioned by the Akropolis Reed Quintet. Refraction is split into three distinct movements, each inspired by different musical sources that have been bent and distorted by time, space, and my imagination, much like light is bent as it enters a medium of different density. The first movement comes from a short, ridiculous, and awesome YouTube video called “Death Metal Chicken,” which features a chicken screaming over a death metal band (of course!). The second movement is called “Kyrie” and is dedicated to Guillaume de Machaut and Arvo Pärt. The third movement is called “Goat Rodeo” and is a strange mash-up of dubstep, funk, and musical pointillism, inspired by a goat rodeo, which is a slang term for a chaotic situation, often one that involves several people, each with a different agenda/vision/perception of what’s going on; a situation that is very difficult, despite energy and efforts, in which to instill any sense or order.