All Things Seem Mention of Themselves

Written in 2021 for chamber orchestra (14 minutes)

Written for the 2021 Composers Conference, Contemporary Performance Institute, and Chamber Music Workshop. Kurt Rohde, Artistic Director.

On Friday, March 6, 2020 I played a show at MOXSonic, where we were speculating if SEAMUS 2020 (occurring the next week) would be canceled because of “that virus thing.” March 8, I received my acceptance to the 2020 Composers’ Conference; March 9 SEAMUS was called off; My Grandfather passed away March 10. March 11, I began this piece; March 12, while driving to Nebraska for my Grandfather’s funeral, the University of North Texas sent out their emails “extending spring break a week” in order to effectively allow for a transition into online instruction, which was then officially announced the next day. The 2020 Composers Conference became virtual early in May: by this point, a significant portion of this piece was already completed for an ensemble twice the size, but it was no longer a question if the COVID-19 pandemic would be a thing for [quite a while]. In retrospect, working on the piece between March and May might have been optimistic; more an act of compartmentalizing a vast array of emotions than purposeful composition work. Still, when the 2021 Composers Conference was announced, I returned to this work (having essentially forgotten it) to find that I could certainly pick up where I left off and bring it into the new instrumentation, forming the genesis of the piece before you.

It’s strange to think that our mental demarcation of time is almost never accurate to our real experiences. There are clear epochs in our lives (pre/post COVID, etc.) that we use to orient ourselves with the events that we experience. Either that, or we will often cluster memories and forget what happens in-between. Still, the reality is that we experience life on a continuum: events, persons, situations enter into our lives, dovetailing, overlapping, departing, and returning to create this tangled mess of happenings that make up our lives. The common denominator here, however, is you- the main character of your story. The form is relatively intangible, but all things point back to what you have experienced and how you ultimately find the meaning in them. It is beautifully tumultuous, but it can be somewhat smoothed out when we stop, reflect, and work out the network of these who, when, where, interactions. While our memories are abstract, the ripples they leave are often concrete: we grapple with them on a daily basis, and the decisions that you made long ago form a part of that bigger story.

My story with this piece crosses what will almost certainly be a paradigm shift in my life (probably everybody’s). So perhaps this piece is a reflection of that (I certainly was interested in these themes while writing it), or maybe it is just a thing that I just happened to carry with me (I do not take for granted the fact that this piece even exists again). Either way, it’s part of that complex network of intertwined happenings and it has been there the entire time. It is not so much about these things, as much as it is a part of them. Coming in and out, wading in the deep of a story.