A collection of 15 keyboard works was inspired by selections from A. R. Ammons’ cycle of poems entitled Ommateum (1955).
Ezra, the poet’s nomadic main character who moves through time and place, life and death, has long captured my imagination. The detached sense of curiosity with which he observes the world and the manner of its striving human occupants routinely saves him as he comes to witness true atrocity and grief. Yet each experience makes Ezra richer for it, he matures with wisdom, and his heart fills with wonder as his Terran journey unfolds unbound by time or embodiment.
The 15 sketches seek to capture an ‘affekt’ of the Ammons’ poems in a tonal frame . While the poet’s narrative pattern occasionally guides the structural form, this music is more about subtext — here presented as an abstract and subjective interpretation of the resonance between emotion and sound.
Josef Albers once said, ” … unlike a painting where all elements can be seen at once, music exists in time from before to now to later … ” (how very Ezra-like!). My hope is that listeners will hear the sequence of tonal events gather over time and find them to be assembled into a structural yet expressive form of dialog.
Silence within music, used here as a form of punctuation to articulate architecture, allows for breath in the midst of cognition. Imagine the orderly and carefully observed physical space between choristers as they process from one end of a cathedral to another. By not breaching the requisite fore and aft proximities, their uncluttered appearance is stately and reassuring. Likewise, as you perform this music, relish and attend to both the sound and silence you create.
Registration at the organ is left to the performer, but with the strong encouragement to make creative and colorful use of any given stop-list. Performers fortunate to have an instrument at their disposal which is tuned in a historic temperament will find additional riches herein.
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