Contrails (2024)

General Information

Commissioner: Written for the Salastina Sounds Promising Composer Program
Written: February – July, 2024
Duration: ca. 7’
Instrumentation: fl + vln +vla + vcl

Performance History

July 9, 2024: Recorded by Ben Smollen [flute], Maia Jasper White [violin], Meredith Crawford [viola], Charles Tyler [cello] (World Premiere Recording)

Perusal Score

~ Coming soon! ~

Program Note

Between August 2022 and April 2023, my entire composition energy was devoted to the writing of my chamber opera Passage. One of the most successful elements of the piece is a feature of its orchestration: occasionally, an instrument doubles a singer, but imprecisely, thus creating a blurry musical melodic entity – a composite of two similar but discrete parts. This idea is very similar to the idea of heterophony (multiple voices singing the same melody, but phrasing, pacing, and ornamenting slightly differently due to the constraints of oral tradition) that appears in the classical musics of many non-Western cultures – my cultural home of traditional Jewish music being one of them. As I thought more about this musical conception – in essence, a melody slipping past itself – I wondered what would happen if the main melody were removed, and all that was left was the difference-space. Thus was born my idea of a musical contrail. In physical reality, a contrail is the cloud created by pressure differentials across the surfaces of an airfoil moving at a just-fast- enough velocity: the contrail is a physical manifestation of the wing’s movement. This piece is made solely of musical contrails: the results of a process where a melody is spliced, diverged, silhouetted, and only the musical contrail is left behind. -BSB