Sometime, Even Later: Three Places in the High Plains

piano and string quartet
25 minutes
Written in 2025 for Chatter, Albuquerque, NM

Thoughts on the piece:

I didn’t realize how much I liked Charles Ives until 2026. That is not to say that I everhated his music, but for some reason I conceptually loved his work more than audibly.Sometime early this year, I found myself watching Ensemble Intercontemporain performThree Places in New England and I was absolutely mesmerized, so I dove in deeperthan I ever had and started exploring his techniques and doing a ton of reading.I think this resonance comes from my own love for Great Plains regionalism andAmericana—something I’ve explored in a lot of recent work—but maybe moreimportantly how memory and juxtaposition can be fluidly traversed in music. In myThree Places, hymn tunes, popular tunes, blue grass, and some older classical musicare referenced to create an intertextual tapestry: the meaning of the piece is less in thepiece itself and more in the network of relationships between the elements within thepiece. What emerges is not a single narrative but a coexistence of many: an approachthat suggests music can function less as a linear statement and more as a field ofassociations, where meaning is constantly renegotiated by the listener. Ultimately, thepiece is not about the materials it contains, but the way they refract one another likememory itself, unstable, layered, and alive in the act of listening. This piece is a fieldrecording.