Liturgy

Written in 2015 to 2016 for chamber choir, percussion, piano, and string quartet (50 Minutes)

"Ligurgy" may refer to an elaborate religious ritual such as the Catholic Mass or Orthodox Divine Liturgy; the term may also apply to daily activities such as the Islamic Salah. Liturgy is also used to describe an active ritual in relation to the divine as a time of reflection, thanksgiving, or repentance. In regards to this work, the term retains its definition with the exception that an inherent deity is not called upon. On the contrary, this piece functions as an introspective ritual, a patient sound world in which there is room for personal reflection. The music unfolds slowly and at times remains static. To fortify these compositional and philosophical ideas, I found it necessary for the piece to have a substantial amount of time to develop.

"The pages turn like the passing of time"

Dark, brooding and heavy, my friend Denis Sorokin described the piece as “very strange and beautiful music […] I find here shadows of music of Ives, Berg, Webern, Feldman; strong forms, brave decisions, ingenuity with select and work on material. really strange, contemporary and amazing!” I did a lot of research on liturgical drama and mass settings, but ultimately this piece ended up being something rather like a well-known piece by a well-known composer (I won't say which, that's for you to find out). But this was the first time that I dreamed big and really brought everything together to put on a huge dream-project. I think there's some radical naivety going on here, and I was definitely swinging well above my weight-class trying to do something like this, but ever since this piece was finished, I've had ideas of huge, massive works that take you into there are sound world for a long amount of time. This was the first chance I had to really explore that idea outside of the theater, incidental music, or something like that; the first time I was really able to take a concert hall and expand it out into a larger, maybe sacred space.

This piece is the first giant piece that I wrote and definitely the most substantial from my University of Nebraska at Kearney days. For my undergrad in composition, we had to put on a Junior Recital and a Senior Recital (30 minutes and 45 minutes of music, respectively). I’m not sure if these recitals could have the same music on one another, but because I did a 5th-year, I used my Junior Recital music for my Graduate School application portfolios, and I knew that my Senior Recital would not occur until about the same time I would be signing an agreement to go to grad school anyway, so rather than fill a whole concert with various unconnected pieces, I thought it would be more fun and more interesting to do something huge and write a giant piece for the show. My professor at the time, Anthony Donofrio, was extremely encouraging of this idea but they told me for it to “count" towards my degree it needed to be something more substantial than just a super long piano solo. So, considering the friends I had at the university and the people I thought might be interested in doing something like this I put together this piece with the whole “Team New Music” involved.

I'm still quite proud of this piece even though it seems like a long time ago. I'm sure there are things inside of this piece that I would be less than excited about upon hearing them now, but this was the first piece that made me think about getting a community together for big projects, the first piece that made me think about large forms and large chunks of time, and the first piece that felt like a really “serious” artistic undertaking. In a way, that might be a spiritual experience on its own, making the concept of the piece evergreen for me.