NEW PIECE DOUBLE BAR YAY SPARKLY DEMO RECORDING AND ALL OF THE MIDI GLOCKENSPIELS

Last night, I delivered the score, parts, and demo recording of “A deep reverberation fills with stars,” which I wrote in honor of Jonathan Grantham’s 20th anniversary at Amador Valley High School.

This is the biggest piece I’ve written since being medicated for ADHD (I was diagnosed in mid-2020), and it’s the most substantial piece I’ve written since the start of the pandemic. (I’ve written very little; it was basically impossible for me to motivate myself when concerts grinded to a halt. Things feel much more normal – and creative – again.)

So the idea with this one, partially by design, but largely just because it happened to turn out this way once I started writing, is that of emerging from darkness, “a deep reverberation,” with the return of some sense of normalcy, coinciding with, at least for me, some hope of an improvement of mental health.
That said, none of this piece is sorrowful. It starts with handbells! (Thank you, Larry Livingston, for your help with that!) But it does spend 8 minutes pulling back and forth between levels of tension before finally “filling with stars.”

It took way too long to write it. I get slower with every piece, but this was sort of ridiculous. I started it January 1, but it wasn’t until January 21st that I wrote something that would remain in the piece. It was all due March 1 – a date I missed by 24 days. All that, and it’s barely over 8 minutes long. I figured being medicated for ADHD would make me SUPER PRODUCTIVE but it doesn’t at all; it makes me SUPER METICULOUS, which, it turns out, is not a speedy trait. This is the piece that I spent over a week writing 30 seconds of music. (That 30 seconds starts on page 33 – 6:46 into the piece. Yeah, I started writing at measure 170. 🤷‍♂️ )

You can view the perusal score here. And here’s the audio.