UC San Diego

Wandering—musical, physical, and psychological—is a vital feature of my creative process as a contemporary composer: it is the common thread which ties my recent compositions together.

In writing North, I traveled by train from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, the northernmost extent of rail which originates from the south in the Canada. I sought to understand how the experience of ‘going North’, and the feeling of arriving there, could be translated into sound. I was particularly fascinated by the psychophysical sensation of ‘coldness’.

In writing Yet Somehow Comes Emptiness, I traveled to the Painted Desert in Arizona, where I spent several days hiking and composing in the wilderness. I was deeply inspired by the badlands, especially the counterpoint between the topography and the diverse pigments of layered clay. In my composition, I represented this counterpoint within a virtual multidimensional space, in which each dimension corresponded to a particular parameter of music.

In writing Oriemur, we will rise, my search for wandering turned inward. Building on my research on memory and medieval monastic rhetoric, I began to create imaginary architectural spaces through which I could wander. In Oriemur this architectural space became increasingly abstract, allowing the associations and metaphors to drift in and out of focus. As a result, the theme of my most recent work has transcended the earthly wandering of physical landscapes to the wandering within the spiritual, yet abstract, dimensions of human consciousness.