ROCKFACE, Chamber Music Piece, 2023

In the summer of 2022 I was selected to participate in a trip led by Composing in the Wilderness, a decade-old composer residency in the Alaskan wilderness. After a week deep in the backcountry of Wrangell St Elias National Park, America's largest national park, composers had six month to write pieces that captured their intimate experience with these remote wildlands. The pieces were premiered at Federal Hall, America's smallest national park, where the nation's first congress was hosted and George Washington sworn in as the first president in 1789.

ROCKFACE explores musical abstractions of glacial formation, erosion, and extinction. Like a glacier, the vital force at the center of the work is compression: when more snow falls than melts each year, the lower layers become compacted under the newer snow. Those lower layers become heavy and dense glacial ice, which carves and crushes rock as it flows downhill. When the glacier recedes due to warming, it leaves behind a sheer and fantastical glacial valley full of lakes, rivers, and streams.

This piece focuses on a descending sequence of intervals where each interval becomes one semitone smaller, from an octave to unison. As a glacier erodes a mountain, this straightforward process of musical compression yields strange and otherworldly forms as it carves spaces over time. After the glacier recedes, a valley stands as a negative image of the ice that once filled it.