RAPTUREABORTED

RAPTUREABORTED responds to the obsession with the Rapture in American evangelism. In September 2025, an onslaught of videos appeared documenting people’s reactions to a South African preacher’s prophecy that the Rapture would take place on the 23rd (or 24th) of that month. When the prophesied date passed and the Rapture failed to materialize, new videos circulated showing believers who had sold their possessions in anticipation of the end of the world. These events, though superficially funny to some who immediately saw the farce in these predictions, seemed to be a microcosm of a greater social erosion in the US. In a healthy society, it would be unthinkable for so many people to sacrifice so much to leave this life for another state of reality. RAPTUREABORTED is the fruit of my trying to understand this symptom of social hysteria.

In the piece, the fixed media part acts as a background that reveals another world containing an ideal that the physical instruments of the quintet can only approach. The pitches from the electronics derive from a chromatic scale built on harmonic series over C and G, while the instruments oscillate between equal-tempered and justly intoned chromatic scales. This opposition in tuning systems manifests as a dance where the two instrumental forces—the acoustic instruments and the electronics—approach each other in intonation and character. However, this convergence makes the music become more unstable. At the end of the piece, the music caves in on itself, falling outside the realm of clear pitch. For me, the anticlimax at the end of the piece mirrors the anticlimax of all religious predictions of apocalypse.

Writing RAPTUREABORTED would not have been possible without my friend Ben Small and his reed quintet, who generously helped me create a recording of the piece.