3232 – 4331 – timp – 2 perc – hp – pno – strings
8 minutes
2017
Listen:
performance by the Catholic University Symphony Orchestra, Simeone Tartaglione, conductor
About:
…of such light brings the listener along for a walk through a forest in the brilliant sun of the late afternoon. While not trying to depict any specific woodland creatures, the tradition of works like Debussy’s Prelude to the afternoon of a faun is hard to ignore. As Mallarme said of Debussy’s piece, my work is an attempt to go further into “nostalgia and light, with finesse, and with sensuality and richness.”
The title to my piece comes another famous woodland meditation: The Lesson of a Tree, found in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days:
In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them—strength, which after all is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty.
