The Abandoned City

The Abandoned City was made on August 26, 2022 alongside Missive to the Sea and Odes on a Dying Rainbow, made the following day. The excerpt I share here is 14 minutes into the composition, when briefly a white-key resonance emerges—a singular moment of clarity and climax in the sound narrative—and dissolves back into a fully chromatic one. Further apposite here 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.