Program note

The question of how we all live together must address the balance between individual and community. The project of the last several decades has been expanding the primacy of the individual in the civilizational calculus resulting in a world-changing blossoming of rights and opportunities and a diversification of expression and perspectives. We’ve also grown more isolated, disconnected—reflected in the shapes of our cities, the orientation of our technology, and the tenor of our politics.* At some point, we passed beyond a happy medium, which we are beginning to recognize—social isolation and depression are through the roof; civic fractiousness is at a fever pitch. Yet we are leaning further into the forces driving us all apart from one another. In this music is both grief and anticipatory grief. We’ve lost much—perhaps most importantly a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves—and we seem on track to lose much more.

Movement 1 (Rifting) sees the social fabric taken to its breaking point. The piece opens with the ever-present question of balance (the musical source of all the material in the piece) and two ideas respond: the first a glowing embrace; the second a trite, unsettlingly child-like march. As the ideas encounter one another, one grows monstrous and the other desperate, bringing us to the center of the piece: conflict full of the same hollow frenzy, horror, numbness, and dislocation that describes parts of modern existence today. Life now regularly features absurd juxtapositions of the mundane and the existential—mass killing and cat videos a nudge of the screen apart from one another. Such trivialization and commodification of human needs and experiences degrades our ability to tell what is important and our ability to care. This music receives a similar treatment, the existential juxtaposed with the trite, the absurd set alongside the sublime—all tossed in a blender, repackaged, enhanced, accelerated, piled upon, versions cast aside with frightening frequency until cycles simply overlap and we find ourselves lost in the storm.

Movement 2 (Epitaph for Lost Time) begins subdued in the shadow of the first movement cataclysm, taking an initially reflective aspect, accounting of what’s been lost—time, pathways, traditions, ecologies, and ways of life cast aside. Initially elegiac, the music grows anguished and then active, fighting a rear guard effort against a force already ascendant. Eventually overcome, the movement fades in resignation: there is no going back. But what lies ahead? 

This movement was sketched in the days following the passing of friend and Portland-saxophone-community-anchor Mark Deffebach; it is dedicated to his memory. Play on, Mark.

The opening of movement 3 (Echoes) is us at our most atomized. Abrupt, stilted utterances establish the icy musical picture. Extended solos for soprano and baritone mull over the original question before the music finds direction. As the ensemble crawls then walks towards answers and warmth, it must contend with traumas, phantom limbs, and stentorian reminders of misremembered/over-learned lessons of the past. In the last section of the piece, the “atomized” music returns, though this time rather than stern and impenetrable, it becomes a kind of delicate footpath to be followed. The final point of arrival? A heartachingly simple blossom of tenderness, a reminder of what is good and true and worth laboring towards even when it’s out of reach.

*respectively: far-flung suburbs that must be navigated in anonymizing and alienating personal vehicles; smart phones that connect as they physically separate and enable the rise of low-friction convenience culture; caricatures of people in out-groups that bear little resemblance to the people being described.