I am thrilled to finally share my most recent compositional work, “fireflies” for voice and percussion. You can watch the video of the premier above, listen to the audio on my soundcloud, and/ or view the recently engraved score that is now online. The piece was composed this winter and performed in March by myself and my dear friend and collaborator Christian Smith. It felt wonderful to write a piece for Christian and myself to play, as we have worked together for many years now, and yet we had never come together in this most obvious formation. The piece also brings together my two favorite compositional media - voice and percussion (specifically found objects and/ or bells) - as well as several of my more abstract musical interests.
The piece was originally inspired by my reading of the book “Distant Light” by Antonio Moresco, in an English translation by Richard Dixon. One passage in particular jumped out at me, and it is from this passage that my piece takes its title and subtitles. In it, a man - or a spirit, it is hard to say - speaks (inwardly) to a bunch of fireflies, and in so doing seems to wrestle with his own thoughts about life.
“Ah... you’re still here! You’re here still!” I try telling them, among all that dark swarming with lights. “So you haven’t been wiped out by the hail storm! Where were you hiding while those hailstones were raining down from the sky and smashing everything? They stop at nothing, not even the most beautiful scented flowers! Where do you hide in the daytime, when no one can see you? You too will have small holes, small underground burrows, somewhere to hide when it’s light, when the sky fills up with hail! But how do you manage to light up like that? What’s inside your poor little insect bodies? What power do you have to light up and transfigure yourselves like this, to produce such a light that can even be seen from far away, and flash on and off constantly, for hours and hours? Where has that tiny, desperate invention come from, that little light. And why, if you then disappear straight after, wiped out, not to be seen again for the rest of the year, if you live just a few weeks, come out from who knows where and thousands of you begin flying around pulsating in the darkness of this night that surrounds us? Why? Why have you invented this inconceivable thing?”
On the same concert that Christian and I premiered “fireflies,” we also premiered an older work by my partner Alex Huddleston entitled “Plague Journal.” Christian and I had recorded the piece in a studio the year before, and that recording can be listened to on Alex’s soundcloud. The live performance is now available to watch as well. It was this piece that inspired the idea that some of the music that both Alex and I write, as well as the music of other contemporary composers interested in all things ephemeral, might be better labeled “ghost music” than any of the usual technical terms. It was also the “sh” whistle that I developed for one of the sounds in this piece that was the original sonic impetus for composing “fireflies;” in a way “fireflies” is a sister piece to “Plague Journal” in that it represents my compositional exploration of a sound developed as a performer of another’s composition. One audience member at the concert also referred to this piece as “desert music,” which seems an appropriate image as well.
