The phrase “every now and then” typically means “on occasion,” or “every once in a while,” but my interest focuses on the concepts “now” and “then.” We think of these terms as independent ideas—there is a now, the present, and a then, separate and different from the now—but further consideration reveals a far more complicated relationship. Every now is experienced by a mind, an artifact constructed by an accumulation of thens, and every then is a recollection accessed in a now.

Influenced by how past and present fold into one another in our conscious experience, “Every Now and Then” folds layered sheets of sound to form complex intergrowths. Certain layers rise to prominence in the texture while others flow under the surface as a topography of associations emerges over time.

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Each piece an archaeology of sound and memory, the works unite thematically through the concept of layers: layered textures, layered expressions of time, and layered references to specific pieces of music and clichéd sonic gestures. The past folds into the present as each piece constructs its expansive sonic space.

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Enfolding

Enfolding (2021) aims to construct a sonic space within which new modes of sensing can be vividly imagined. Materials bound by abstract associations explore the relationship between interior and exterior: metaphorically our own interior worlds and the webs of activity that influence our actions and thought patterns, or more literally the interior world of a piece of art and the greater context within which is it born. The music folds an ecosystem of historicized materials into its interior world, both extending out and absorbing in, blurring distinctions between the past and of the present.

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I’d known this place

I’d known this place (2020) for clarinet and electronics exists as a string of four distinct dreams, each its own misremembering of a familiar past. Like how memories transform in meaning through repeated recollections, these dreams reconstruct some partial truths of a remembered past but invariably create a new organization. The four sections are titled as follows:

Dream I: gleaming, radiant marble
Dream II: first return
Dream III: the deepest wellsprings
Dream IV: the mind revealing itself to itself

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Memoryscapes

Memoryscapes (2019) for sinfonietta and electronics transforms key elements of four works from the Western art music canon to form immersive sonic landscapes. Each section zooms in on a particular moment from its source piece of music—moments that most directly speak to a particular sensation, emotion, or concept—and expands the moment into a new musical world of sound and process. The titles of the four sections are as follows:

I. For one who lives in anguish, time limps
II. The simultaneous expansion of specific shapes in different time-spaces
III. We do not hear what we hear… only what we remember
IV. The hearers should be allowed to discover the situations