Compositions

Upon seeing Leonora Carrington’s painting Red Horses of the Sídhe, I instantly wanted to describe it with sound. After sketching some ideas for the opening of a work based on this surrealist painting, as I was a rising sophomore music major at Princeton at the time, I decided to reach out to Professor Ruth Ochs about undertaking this piece as a collaboration with her mighty Princeton University Sinfonia. The first movement, Peat, attempts to capture the lush darkness of which Carrington deftly wove the brooding sky above, and the engulfing bog below. This movement is based on a piano improvisation that I did last fall, so you will hear my efforts to orchestrate with “the pedal down,” as the great Christopher Theofanidis says, and I hope you will perceive the moment where that wisp of an other-worldly castle erupts from the rumbling portents. The second movement, Togail Bruidne Dá Derga (The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel), is named after the source material for Carrington’s painting. It is the tale of Conaire, the High King of Ireland, who is beset and slain for breaking his geasa, or taboos. I found this tale fascinating in the convolutions of its ancientness, and you will hear the blurring of the line between the natural and supernatural that characterizes the work. The title comes from the way in which Conaire becomes king—fulfilling a prophecy by walking naked upon the road to Tara—and also refers to the writer’s block that I suffered while working on this piece, leaving me with ten days to write it, and utterly humbling me as an artist. I am incredibly grateful to Professor Ochs for her trust in me to create a work worthy of her ensemble, to whom I owe undying gratitude for their dedication to its conveyance.