Untouched

I wrote "Untouched"in the fall of 2023 in preparation for a performance at the 2024 North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) National Conference in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The work is a follow-up piece to another piece I wrote for the same instrumentation titled "Unfenced." Both pieces were inspired by United States National Park system. With "Untouched" I knew I wanted to capture the idea that humans have done a lot of development on National Park land that has negatively affected those ecosystems. Despite these negative effects, those developments have improved access to the parks by many people who never could have enjoyed them before. These improvements make parks more accessible but alters them; Maybe the same could be said about classical music. This led me to J. S. Bach, a composer who is commonly performed by both percussionists and saxophonists, even though none of those instruments existed when Bach was composing. With a lot of searching, what I landed on was Bach chorale #33, titled "We Have Mistreated" to use as a basis for this work.