Read by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra on January 17th, 2023. Click here for a perusal score.
PROGRAM NOTE
we walk in the sun in hundreds derives its name from a poem titled “The Half-Finished Heaven” by Tomas Tranströmer (translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton)
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Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out, even the ghosts take a draught.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around. We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees. The lake is a window into the earth.
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The image of a luminous multitude is part of what inspired my orchestral imagination while I composed this piece. Throughout the work, tightly-knit unison canons are built into the texture of the orchestra to create a kind of echo chamber for the simple, spectrally-informed harmonies I used as source material. On a more general level, this piece celebrates the sonic breadth of the orchestra and its capacity to overwhelm human perception. There is a particular “un-together togetherness” in splintering a melody into myriad self-similar strands of counterpoint, which, I hope, affects something similar to the ecstatic feeling of finding oneself in a massive crowd.