Commentary: http://innig.net/music/inthehands/101

Brahms – Intermezzo Op. 116 No. 4 – Paul Cantrell, piano

This is a rough version of the introductory song from my cycle in progress: an invocation, a summoning, a mystery posed. The cycle’s songs all flirt with the boundaries of speech. This one is worked out phoneme by careful phoneme to suggest the presence of language without revealing specific words. I’m curious: What words do you hear? Do you hear words at all?

Cycle for Kim Sueoka (in progress) – Song #1

Entanglement, soliloquy, tango, flight: each movement poses a problem from which the next unfolds. Themes continually resurface, transformed, as the music reinvents its own past — the endless process Gabriel García Márquez described as “piecing together the broken mirror of memory from so many scattered shards.” The coda gathers everything together, grappling, burning  down — and then, from the embers, a simple benediction emerges, present all along, now laid bare. We discover in retrospect that the music’s destination has always been its source.

I wrote the bass clarinet part for Pat O’Keefe. He is a wise and gracious collaborator, the rare sort of polyvalent musician a composer dreams of. This piece would not exist without his help.