Song

About

By setting out to write a Song, it forced me to reevaluate what this musical pillar meant to me. At what point does the succession of one tone to another become a melody, and at what point does the melody become a song? What is my relationship to the many traditions of Song writing within classical music and beyond? Confronting these questions and what this pillar of music meant to me, in relation to my historical, cultural, and personal identity was part of the process of writing this music.

The potential for the materiality of sound to be phrased melodically is central to the expressive language of this music. The movement from the open D string to playing the same note on the fourth string on the violin with more vibrato, the action of removing just one key of an ordinary tone and slightly adjusting embouchure, or the movement of a tone from one musician to another is, to me, fundamentally a melodic gesture, with infinite expressive potential.

Regardless of the music’s surface layer, this Song comes from a private expressive desire and impulse to phrase, play and sing a melodic line.