band/wind ensemble large

This work is appropriate for Middle School bands.

Openings is written for winds and percussion. There are four movements: mouth, mind, eye and
ear. The piece began in 2004 as I walked up the Spruce Spring Trail near Red Canyon
campground in the Manzano Wilderness for the first time. Openings is physically connected to
the density of the trail as one climbs up a ridge of the mountain. When you've reached a certain
height there are openings out into the mesa where you can see for miles and miles. Openings is
artistically connected to Encounter, the installation piece I made in collaboration with visual artist
Hee Sook Kim.

The title of my work, The Sound of Light, has many implications that relate to my thoughts while writing the piece: first, there is the fact that sound can literally become light under certain conditions in a technical process called sonoluminescence. The fact that vibration can take the form of sound or light depending on frequency led me to imagine how light would sound, if I could hear it. These imaginings, of course, are of a very personal nature, and not meant to be literal or programmatic. Light exists at virtually all times with some degree of darkness, and this dynamic is very much a part of my composition.

When talking about musical timbre, we often refer to the “color” of sound, and there is no group of instruments with a greater range of tone colors than the orchestral winds. Thus the choice of instruments for my piece is predicated on this range of tone-color variations that is often described in relation to lightness and darkness.