When I first became interested in composition, I was drawn to minimalism through personal performance of works by composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Further study of minimalist music led me in two directions. The first was an awareness of, and engagement with, popular music, and the second was a consideration of large scale form.

I had always listened to popular music but, until recently, I hadn’t found a way to connect it to my own concert music. While I am a student in the classical composition department at the Thornton School of Music, there is also a popular music department. Recently I met a pop songwriter and we started collaborating. With concert music, I was able to hide behind the notes. I felt that I could skirt around vulnerable expression by focusing on abstract sounds blended together to form the pieces that I wrote. But after working with my songwriter friend, I decided it was time to take some additional risks. I wanted to force myself to be vulnerable in a new way within my art. As a composer who has been exposed to many styles of music with voice, I was faced with a dilemma. Which style did I feel most comfortable singing? While working on my concert music, I would practice singing by writing songs. These songs were influenced by the folk Americana music of people like Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, and more recently by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) or Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes). I had never considered myself a lyricist but pushed myself to write. As I compiled a few songs, I started to connect them to my instrumental work and the idea of creating an album emerged. By performing my own songs, written in a popular style, I was finally able to connect my popular music interests with my concert music.

My interest in form began with a deep dive into Mahler. I found similarities to minimalism in Mahler's glacial forms and slowly developing musical ideas, but his material was denser and there was room for more active, small-scale change. I also experimented with cues and musical triggers. I wanted to implement large-scale formal planning and cues/triggers in “Floating Fields”.

“Floating Fields” is broken up into two large sections with an intro and outro that bookend the album and a middle track that separates the two sections. The first section consists of songs without lyrics and has a darker tone. Each song in this section is bracketed by a microtonal piano chord. This chord is the backdrop for violin material that acts to cue the middle track “Jagged sun”. The darker material as heard in “Half of coal”, is harmonically dense, consisting of a microtonal chorale that slowly moves up about 30 cents per chord. In “Pans and candles” a slow build increases the speed and intensity of the section. Finally, the material from “Half of coal” is expanded and layered to increase density in “They softly sit”. This song is the climax of the first half of the album.

The second half of the album builds to the outro track, “All Alone”. At the end of “Jagged sun”, there is a different chord, voiced more openly, that plays throughout the second section. This section, while written with a lighter tone musically, is composed entirely of songs with lyrics inspired by in impulse to want to escape quarantine. I populate these tracks with cascading piano and guitar textures and abstract imagery. If the first section is the cold-hard-truth of my situation, the second section, and subsequent outro, are a vain effort to free myself of the monotony of quarantine. “Forecasting a glow” also has words that are my internal monologue, like the tracks in the first section. But, they are somewhat mindless, almost like passing observations when commuting or while sitting in a waiting room. The feeling of uncertainty, but knowing that this lockdown situation was not permanent, was channeled into the latter songs of the work.

Throughout “Floating Fields” I revisit small motives, melodic lines, and both timbral and rhythmic textures. Something that has recently interested me is the reference of other work. I have been listening to the Wu-Tang Clan’s sampling of Thelonious Monk, and to Eric Wubbels’ interpretation of “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. These pieces create a dialogue with other like works by sourcing the material through reference. However, I wanted “Floating Fields” to be a totally personal project so the musical material I was going to reference overtly, i.e. through repetition and/sampling, had to be my own internal language. I did this by picking a few lyrical sign posts that keep appearing, “floating fields”, or “jagged” are some examples. I also used similar alternate tunings, or repeated bitonal chord progressions that appear in various tracks. By doing this, I hoped to create a sense of internal cohesion through reference while also subverting the expectation of what the modern album often is: simply a collection of recorded songs.

Because the modern album seems to encourage single-song listening, I wanted to push back against that by making a full piece of music that works as a 40-minute composition, but with individual songs for shorter listening experiences if desired. For general music listeners, I hope to intrigue them during the first half of the album and to present them with material they might not expect in a singer-songwriter type work. For the new music listener, I hope to interest them through the juxtaposition of experimental, microtonal sound-scapes, and produced, un-notated
songs.