Walls of Brocade Fields
Written in 2019 for orchestra (10 minutes)
Original Program Note
In Lincoln, Nebraska, there is the International Quilt Study Center & Museum. Walking through the museum, I can’t help but feel a sense of duality: the richly decorated patterns, but the somewhat nostalgic quality that can come with the medium. I’m particularly drawn to flowers and brocade fabrics; fields of intricately designed flowers line the wall and fill your vision. This piece is full of crossing and repeated patterns laid across each other, at times interacting, and sometimes more exposed. At times, the sounds are encompassing and warm, wrapping the listener in a blanket of sound, others are sparse and open. Overlapping notes and phrases create subtle cadences and nearly tonal reminisces. Underneath all of this harmonic wrapping is a unifying pulse connecting the material, and keeping the threads together.
Thoughts on the Piece
This was my second orchestral piece but it feels a little bit closer to my own personality than The Location of Lines may feel these days. Of course, I’m still really proud of The Location of Lines, but this one has a certain joyousness to it, maybe even a little more accessibility, that really resonates with me. I love the headspace this piece takes me to when I hear it, I love being able to swim in the orchestra, I love being able to climb the climaxes, build and recede, see these peaks and valleys take shape, and hear all these connections or little threads of sound come in and out of existence. It’s almost feels like a major-cord piece, or the faster movement of something, or the finale or something.
When I moved to Texas, I knew that UNT had a lot of opportunities for orchestral work for students, which was one of the reasons why I came here in the first place. This piece was part of a wave of orchestra pieces - four in total, (one of them has been withdrawn because it was terrible) – they all got meaningful workshops with young musicians. I learned a lot about writing for orchestra with this piece, things that I would do later pieces, especially large ensemble pieces, and plenty of things that still show up in 2024 that I feel like I haven’t quite seen all the way through yet.
Still, this piece feels a little truncated to me: I wish it was a few minutes longer maybe even twice as long for a lot of the sections. When I did the Cone Institute with Steven Mackey, he had at the bassoons play an excerpt from the big climax near the end of the peace to show me that all these details could be their own moments as well. I never really realized how awesome it sounded just in isolation, and there’s a lot of orchestration ideas that I think are really interesting in this piece but get a little buried. It would’ve been nice to take the time to really flush out and linger for quite a bit longer.
I think this shows some of my influences on my sleeve. I’ve been told that this piece sounds like a mix of Sibelius, John Luther Adams; it may be some kind of Feldman or something but anytime people say my music sounds like Feldman I’m extremely skeptical of whoever is saying that. I’ll take the other two comparisons, that’s fine: I have a tattoo of Sebelius, and I love John Luther Adams, so whether or not those two influences or explicitly referenced by this piece, I can’t really say at this point, but I can say that those composers are extremely important to me, so I’m sure it’s there somewhere.
On a different note, this piece feels like it has a reference towards a regionalism that I sometimes get associated with. This idea that this idea that I’m a “Nebraskan Composer,” especially if you consider the original program note and it’s association with a Quilting Museum in Nebraska. Of course, this links quite well next to my ideas with visual arts and how visual arts can relate to music, but I’ve been told that the music sounds like a landscape of gentle hills. It doesn’t really have mountains and valleys as much as it is large field of possibility and a sound of long tones mingling with these tiny little punctuation marks of rhythm and patterns folded on top of each other. I’m not here to say that this piece is about Nebraska or that it sounds like Nebraska, or that it’s about quilting, or sounds like quilting… but I keep the door open to the possibility that that influence is certainly there and these sounds can be found in there, somewhere. If that’s the thing that is heard by a listener, perhaps even you reading this note, I’m not going to be the person to say that it’s wrong; even if that stuff isn’t at the front of my mind while creating a piece, it’s still part of my story and part of my life so I think it is meaningful a part of this bigger picture. That door is open.