Notes:

Dreaming a world’s edge was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. The movements are performed without pause.

Many of my recent compositions link to natural environments and ecosystems, particularly landscapes that are fragile or endangered. This piece was inspired by a photography exhibit I recently saw at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art featuring the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper. He traveled to some of the most geographically remote places on the planet and took his photos — usually with only one exposure for each location — using an antique nineteenth century camera. I was awed by how these luminous pictures of rocks and seascapes seem to dissolve the frame and create a sense of limitless eternity. Especially moving are the photos of the polar regions, with their extremity and evocativeness, such as “Dreaming the North Polar Winter Solstice” or “Uncharted Danger, Clear” in Antarctica. There’s also a kind of elegiac quality to these photos, as with climate change many of these places will soon be gone or greatly changed.

In my music I like to use an expanded palette of instrumental techniques that elicit as many colors as possible. Particularly important to me are fragile, delicate, noisy and unstable timbres. The overall form of this piece is in four movements played without pause, with strong correspondences between the first and fourth movements. Dreaming a world’s edge was commissioned by the League of Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. It was composed for The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and this premiere is gratefully dedicated to them.