trumpet, double bass, and fixed media
9 minutes
Commissioned by Kenken Gorder
info
Premiered at the SEAMUS National Conference, DiMenna Center, New York, NY
April 8, 2023
Kenken Gorder, trumpet
Will Yager, double bass
program note
The Road and the Stars is about the line we (as humanity) walk between our perceptions and imaginations — how we try to understand our reality not from the active locus of experience, but from an imagined remove, with a spiritual or scientific objectivity. In this way, our perceptions, the bodily awareness of our surroundings, are subject to the resonant chamber of imagination. What we see is filtered and reenforced by what we seek. And so, our attention may be split between the terrestrial and the cosmic — between the sensory phenomenon of living and the yen for meaning and understanding – between the road we walk and the stars that light the sky. This work is inspired by, and the title is borrowed from the final paragraph of “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time” by Ben Ehrenreich.