Orchestral MUSIC
increment (2019)
*** Winner of the 2020 Arthur Friedman Prize
In today’s world it has become an incredibly difficult task to keep aware of what is ‘normal’, or at least what has seemed so at one time or another. Seemingly small and incremental changes to our social contract are gradually wearing away at our perception of societal order. These changes can be so constant that our capacity for activism or outrage or even simple attention can be worn thin. If a people cannot remain vigilant against these steadily encroaching revisions to our way of life, the door is left open for our entire social contract to be demolished.
In this piece I attempted to explore the experience of living through these steady and imperceptible changes. A lone trumpet is heard from the orchestra, playing a melody that will be intoned throughout the piece, perhaps representing truth, perhaps one’s sense of self, or perhaps simply the idea that what one can experience must be the truth. As these utterances are played, a subset of the string orchestra plays an ominously slow moving progression of harmonies that exist at the periphery of the orchestra’s low and high registers. This body of instruments remain static until they gradually introduce small interruptions to the music. These interruptions while unobtrusive, barely noticeable at first, become steadily more emphatic until they are simply a part of the fabric of the piece. At a certain point, these interruptions take over and become an un-ignorable and terrifying breakdown of the music. All this time, the listener has likely been so distracted by these interruptions that it is difficult to notice the slow transformation in timbre of the original melody that has occurred. The original solo trumpet returns suddenly, now faint and distant, reminding of where this music began, but for the first time musically transformed.
