The shortest day of the year / is favorable
— William Carlos Williams “Solstice”
While the summer solstice is more congenial to us warm-blooded creatures, it‘s the winter solstice that has more magic and power: the turning point where life and activity begin again. It can also be the night of the longest dreams.
Slow Fires, Long Shadows both stay with us as night falls. The music of this first movement contains long stretches of static harmony, although there are little decorations and murmurs (arabesques, melodic fragments, string glissandi) lying just under the surface. Sometimes these gestures erupt into something more in the foreground before collapsing back into the sustained sounds that make up the main musical fabric.
The Turning is more active, as if our dreaming has already turned the corner into renewal and growth. This second movement has sharper rhythmic shapes and more defined melodic gestures. What I've tried to capture in both movements is a kind of dream-time sensibility: a world that has its own skewed logic and obeys its own rules that don't necessarily seem rational but nevertheless feel coherent and whole.