Premiered by Grace Stringfellow in Wichita, Kansas on April 20th, 2024.

Duration: c. 10:00

Instrumentation: English Horn

Each movement of this piece was written in a single sitting during a one-week trip to Berlin in a very cold March of 2023. The movements are Vorspiel, Die Welle (after the painting by Courbet that I saw in the Alte Nationalgalerie), Unruhe in der Lobby (this one was written in the very loud and chaotic lobby of the hostel I was staying in), and Narben, which was inspired by the scars that run through the city to show where the Berlin Wall stood for 28 years.

I enjoyed my trip to Berlin, but it was very, very cold, and the city wears its history on its sleeve, which is important. It’s impossible to not think of the immense suffering that took place for so long in the last century, and so a lot of those thoughts and feelings made their way into this piece.