Missive to the Sea, of which I share the first three minutes here, was made on August 26, 2022. Apposite are my notes to Odes on a Dying Rainbow, which I quote:

Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

Watch the full video here.

Odes on a Dying Rainbow, an excerpt of which I share here, is one example of the way distinctions between improvisation and composition dissolve in my work in a way unlike that of any other composer.

The work was created on August 27, 2022. It consists of three prolonged gazes (18-19 minutes each) on the same thought-image. Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

The almost identical duration of the three odes points to an intuitive exactitude that Arnold Schoenberg called a “sense of form” and which he regarded as the most important aspect of a composer’s creative awareness.

In the coming weeks I will be releasing two more works that were made in the same vein the day prior.

Watch the full Odes on a Dying Rainbow video here.