Of Rain and Air for Chamber Orchestra

Back in 2020, after I finished my first commission from the Albany Symphony, they sent me a wonderful book of collected poems. One of the poems included in this book, Of Rain and Air by Wayne Dodd, immediately resonated with me with its beautiful, evocative imagery and its striking relevance to both the sounds I was exploring in my new piece for Albany Symphony and what I was experiencing at the time. My piece is not a musical setting of the poem, but I feel it shares much of the same feeling as that of the text, as if they were part of the same world.

The piece explores two musical materials: a delicate, shimmering background present throughout the entire work and a foreground consisting of brief swells of fragmented harmonies. I used Of Rain and Air as the title of my piece, because these elements of nature felt closely related to these two musical components and because the poem encapsulates what I feel to be the narrative of my piece – a kind of darkness to light narrative representing the process of becoming more present in an experience.

Performance by Julius Akira Mauldin and The Westside Chamber Players in the Church of the Holy Apostles, New York, NY.