Find Me at the Horizon

for SSA and piano

2019

“Find Me at the Horizon” was inspired by José Esteban Muñoz, a queer theorist who passed away in 2013. I desperately wish he was still writing and offering new ways to see the world. In Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz describes queerness as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” as “a longing that propels us onward,” as "that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, and indeed something is missing.” In this rendering, Muñoz also identifies queerness' gift as a force that allows us to re-imagine, re-formulate, re-dream, a force that allows us to re-vision this endless horizon, a horizon that could be described as utopia, but one that feels at times fleeting and ephemeral, because we collect it in fragments of transitory feelings and glimpses of the future. While I originally wrote the piece with queerness in mind, Muñoz’s invitation to imagine impossible futures is one that seems abundantly relevant now. 

For me, we live at a time of an old world collapsing and a new world being created. In this piece, I wanted to speak to the new world, I wanted the text and music to invite a listener to imagine what a better world could feel like. It is not, by any means, a practical exercise, but instead one that exists ephemerally, in fragments.

Text:

Where mountain meets dusk,
Where ember finds spark,
Where silence meets sound—
Find me at the horizon.

Where stillness meets dance,
Where road turns animal,
Where barricades meet fire—
Find me at the horizon.

Where sea catches cloud,
Where bone meets river,
Where moon meets shadow—
Find me at the horizon.

Where stone turns sand,
Where desert meets rain,
Where memory finds healing—
Find me at the horizon. 

Come, step out of time
Where dawn meets new colors—
Find me at the horizon.