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.

for string quartet
2013

i. a childhood memory
you followed that girl with too many smiles
and too few emotions,
while i followed my sky.

ii. we were negated in youth
somewhere between the growing up,
the growing unwise and too old
or rather -
losing childhood --
we lost each other.

iii. we reach each other as concealed blades
you wore long sleeves
and i didn't own shorts.
we suffered and coped in ways we shouldn't say out loud,
but we hadn't yet learned to read each other's
darkness.

iv. the world unsewn -- you almost died
i found you in the mountains and the wind wouldn't stop -
(i didn't know if i'd find you alive)
the ranger had that posture about him
and you were crying.
i couldn't talk to you then -
you were taken to the hospital and received nine stitches about the artery in your right wrist.
("we'll try to save your kidneys")

v. now and not yet happened
"i want to live i just don't know how"
we walk the tracks at night and share the silence that says everything.
something changed from then to now
and something will keep changing from after to now to after,
but slowly we become
worthy
of our suffering.

unpainted