Linear, narrative plots are not accessible to all audiences, and while the vast majority of my work involves coloring my music with plot points and storyline visuals or textual elements, I wanted to create something that left the narrative element for the audience to design due to the abstract nature of the work itself. In a way, it is a work in which you choose your own adventure. 

Who are the characters of your story?

Where do they find themselves set in time?

Is there a fight of good versus evil?

And where do they  find your place in the sun?

We’re always trying to create a cohesive whole out of disparate parts, and CHASING LIGHT asks the audience to do just that. Whatever narrative exists is only because you created it, and as a result, the work will mean something different to everyone. As the duration of the work spans 95 minutes, there’s an element of size and scale at play—you should feel as though you’ve traveled somewhere and that perhaps whatever you are is only a small piece of a much larger picture and that the internal workings that are required to make even the most simple of things happen are truly fascinating—

—and what a truly astounding place

[and time] we live in.
 

The work was also born out of a desire to experience something I've yet to experience, but yearned for in a theatrical environment.Watching films like Fantasia growing up, I wondered what it would feel like if the waves we saw on screen also felt cold or wet or if they smelled like salt, would the music sound different? Seeing a budding interest in installation works of light has been exciting, but upon visiting them myself, I’ve felt underwhelmed by the sonic environment. CHASING LIGHT is the multi-sensory experience I often imagine when listening to music, willed to life with collaborators for an audience

The harmonic and musical vocabularies used in the work are difficult to describe—and composers often shy away at the responsibility of doing so. The specific environments I was trying to sonically recreate necessitated a variety of techniques to be effective. In selections like Abandoned Places, the selection has structured improvisation, time-based/proportional notation, and extended techniques to help create the haze and dirt we often associate with spaces left unattended and abandoned. In juxtaposition, movements like Prism focus on rhythmic transformation of small ideas to create confusion in the main subject you are to try and follow. 

—and yet, the music is certainly of one world, and one that I have curated especially for you. Larger themes connect the work across its multiple sections, hopefully giving you the feeling of deja vu. And some feeling of history repeating itself.