I wrote my Chamber Symphony No. 1 during a year when I was serving as the conductor of the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble. The piece was written for soprano Wallis Lucas and a small group of fifteen players, with the hope that its small scale might make it easier to perform again in the future. I had never written for the voice before, so to get a better sense of it, I sat in on Wallis’s lessons as well as the voice department’s performance class. I also did an independent study on writing for the voice with Dr. Katherine Pukinskis, and all of these things helped me build on the confidence I needed to write the two vocal movements of this piece.

The four movements all circle around winter and the longing for spring. Snowscape recalls childhood winters in Pennsylvania, especially a memory of walking through the woods with my dad at the end of the movement. Tear Down the Sky sets a poem by my friend Bella Christoffersen and tries to capture both the bleakness and beauty of overcast weather. The Scherzo is like a mirage of spring and summer where the music is very playful, but at one point is interrupted by reality. And the final movement, Frühlingstraum, sets Müller’s famous poem (the same one Schubert used in Winterreise) as a kind of dream of warmth and renewal that always fades back into the reality of winter.

A piano-vocal score will be available eventually.