Almanac

for string quartet

2017

For me, writing music can sometimes feel like a constant question of WHO AM I. Some pieces feel like battlegrounds, where identity asserts itself against all odds. Others are floating dreams, unconcerned and unaffected, identity trailing lightly behind. Others still, I am changed by the end.

This piece was hard to write. It felt like I was flailing through this question, doubting myself before putting my pen to paper. I've grown to appreciate being lost in flailing though, or at least finding it preferential to being lost in consistent or comfortable habit.

Amid this process, my teacher Carter pointed out that my music sounds more sure of itself than I sound when I talk about it. Within this reflection, I realized that my music is a map. All of it is vulnerable, my internal landscape upended, drawn from this corner to that, on display in its nakedness, yet made more powerful in being witnessed. The music can be consulted along the way, a guide of sorts, of how things were before I had a verbal way to describe them. And thus, I wrote an almanac, music that is overly affected by being looked at, but earnest in its vulnerability and unashamed of its questing.