Premiered on July 28, 2022
Grace Park & Jason Uyeyama, violins
Jessica Oudin & Tanner Menees, violas
Dariusz Skoraczewski & Ari Evan, cellos
Harold J. Miossi Center for the Performing Arts | Cuesta College
San Luis Obispo, CA
Absence of Sky was commissioned in 2018 for Festival Mozaic's 50th anniversary season in 2020. The original concept for the piece was exploring perspective, and that was before the massive global suffering and shifts in perspective that have happened since. The composition was nearly complete in Spring 2020 when the country shut down. While composer friends of mine Zoom'd about having more time than ever to write, I was overwhelmed with survival work since I work for an orchestra (A Far Cry) and the performing arts world had just evaporated. This circumstance completely stunted my creative process. By the time I came back to finish the piece, I didn't recognize it and had to take it apart.
In the process of deconstructing the work, I had an opportunity to apply the original concept to rebuild the piece, now coming from an "outsider's" perspective. The opening sonority is a dense, low-lying chord, and was the first thing I wrote in 2018. Despite my feeling like most of the other material existed without purpose, this chord still felt like the seed germ of the work. As it hangs still in the air, the lower strings emerge revealing a kind of warm core followed by the upper strings emphasizing more abrasive contrasting notes. Experiencing the sonority in this way gives a window into the piece's unfolding process: sonorities, melodies, whole sections, and sub-groups of players challenge and adopt each other's musical perspectives, ultimately coalescing in the final minutes.
Since learning to drive, I've enjoyed exploring back roads until getting lost then finding my way home. Coming from the East coast's gentle rolling hills of deciduous forest for hundreds of miles in any direction, I'm always struck by driving for 30 minutes in any direction out of SLO to a different biome: mountainous canyons, dramatic coast, Cali-Tuscan wine country, desert, marshlands, fragrant coastal forests, extinct volcanoes... Six years ago, I left my host's home in Los Osos in an incredibly thick morning fog, driving to get my toddler to nap and got lost. We ended up at a broad beach and went for a long walk. The fog was so dense you couldn't hardly see the water unless you walked up to it. The morning wore on, the sun gradually dissolving the fog so we could see the sky, the fog-diffused light giving way to a bright morning. From nowhere, it was revealed to us that we had been strolling right next to the massive Morro Rock and had been completely unaware of its presence. It was a stunningly beautiful experience of awe, first disorienting then assuring. Recalling this moment helped guide the rebuilding process of Absence of Sky with wishes to somehow translate the experience across the arc of the piece.