white blooms : scattered blue

This piece was a wonderful collaboration with poet Hillary Gravendyk Burrill that began in a seminar taught by Robert Hass and William Bolcom. It was a tremendous opportunity, not only to get to know Robert Hass and William Bolcom, but also to meet and work with several excellent poets in the UCB community.

For some time prior to the composition of this piece I had been struggling to give voice to some subtle concepts relating to musical time, texture, and rhythm. In white blooms : scattered blue I feel I was finally able to articulate these ideas in a satisfying fashion. In particular in this composition I deal with durational and rhythmic aleatory and its spectrum of problems and possibilities.

white blooms : scattered blue consists of 5 short songs, all of which you can listen to via the audio player above.  It was written for piano and high voice. The 5 songs are titled “stones glow…”, “somethings says…”, “rustle of salt pines…”, “white rocked…”, and “whorls of shell…”