Devil’s Slide - For Symphony Orchestra (2018)

Program Notes:

The writing of Devil's Slide followed a period of intense grappling and introspection in my creative process, during which I wrote my String Quartet and a short piano quartet. Both of those pieces are characterized by struggle and emotional dissonance. For this piece, I drew on a small sketch that I had written in 2016, a repetitive little earworm that I couldn't find a place for at the time. Given the transformations in the world and my own music since 2016, I felt that it would be interesting, and perhaps centering, to return to that time of my musical life.

The piece begins in a place of uncertainty and fragmentation, in which a repetitive figure is tossed around the orchestra.

The figure is suddenly transformed into an easygoing theme, stated casually by the string section. As the piece continues, new bits of melodic material are thrown into the mixture, and the piece crystalizes again into a more coherent vision of the theme, stated by the piano and a very high bassoon solo. The theme gets stuck in a loop before disintegrating into a kind of quite reflection. Held back for most of the piece, the brass finally enter, further fragmenting the theme into it's most basic elements, before finding a confident fanfare to end the piece.

The title of Devil's Slide is borrowed from a dramatic ocean-side cliff in Pacifica, California, which was once home to a piece of the West Coast's famous Highway 1. When erosion forced a rerouting of the road through the mountainside, the paved road was converted into a beautiful and remarkably accessible hiking trail. My piece is a similar exercise in recycling, and marks a kind of "slide" backwards towards my earlier musical.

Written for the Aspen Music Festival

Duration: 6 minutes