Instrumentation

1.1.1.1 - 1.1.1.0 - perc(2) - hp. - str.

Background

Written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and made possible through a completion grant given by ARTZenter. To be performed September 8, 2026, at Brava Theater in San Francisco, CA, with Eric Dudley conducting.

This piece encapsulates several areas of interest that I have accumulated during graduate studies, one of the most important here being an understanding of musical form and structure as reflecting and imperfectly reproducing an artist’s perception of the forms and structures that constitute the world around them. More technical interests explored in this piece include the simultaneous use of multiple independent tempi and the use of development through elaboration of limited and self-similar material rather than through the addition of new material.

Program Note

There were pearls around your neck, and in each beaded strand, our images dimly reflected, faces looming from inner nacreous fog each at a unique angle: a thousand worlds reproduced in surface only, distorted sometimes past recognition but always emerging from something, always capturing something that was true, beginning wrapped around a hard grain of sand and built up through layers till seemingly new.

It seems at first a problem of scale: for beneath were pearls, too, in single file lines curled to form thin crimson webs, in whose motion entire lives are invented and forgotten, dreaming en masse though they know nothing at all. Even starting below us these dreams rise, spiraling, enveloping us, directing our eyes upwards, till we see yet more pearls, a soft blue haze scattered densely hanging all around, glittering sweetly, heavy and thick.

Remember that gaze, its intense rays scanning, sweeping, a thin golden line that invents, dreams, dreams of you and I, dreams of pearls, turns back upon itself, curving through space to form loops, loops whose spinning upon their ends like so many spilled coins forms spheres, spheres that glow, softly lustrous, strung together around us, reflecting our faces. We were there, in those pearls, looking up and looking down, you and I, in these one thousand self-portraits.