Spinning a DreamSong (2025) All of us are drawn to our dreams in one way or another. As a composer who is obsessed with form and the inner workings of music patterns (one of my colleagues characterizes it as “a desire to take the back of the watch off to see how the gears work”), I am intrigued by how dreams unfold and arrange themselves, apart from the content of those dreams. Spinning a DreamSong is inspired by that unfolding. It is a musical representation of some of those dream-patterns: ideas / words / actions that don’t follow logically, but somehow still seem related or recur in different ways.
My friend and long-time collaborator Denise Newman was kind enough to select some excerpts from her poems that fit into this narrative. This, in turn, inspired my own poetic fragments. All juxtaposed in a way that isn’t a traditional narrative, but together produce something that flows and is carried along by the musical narrative. The use of electronic sounds adds another layer, commenting and complimenting the sung sounds.