Cavern

In the summer of 2018, I rented a tiny house for a personal composition retreat in the town of Fairfield, Iowa. I brought along a keyboard and laptop, and spent most of the time playing around with shifting arpeggiation patterns programmed in the computer. After a week I left with little more than a few bars of textual music and a glimmer of a harmonic idea. On the way back to my home in Wisconsin I passed Cave of the Mounds, and I thought about how the music I'd written felt somehow crystalline, like the inside of a geode. Only much later did I figure out how to marry the music with a chorale that evokes endless depth and grandeur, alternating with intimate spaces, drips, echoes – a place of discovery and wonder.

- Program Note by composer