Home

The music for Joy of Regathering combines music from many different traditions: Indian classical music, jazz, rock, free improvisation, western classical music, experimental electronic music, data sonification, and a piece I wrote in 2020 for the Jupiter String Quartet, Chaconne/Labyrinth. Here is the program note:

“Chaconne” is an old-fashioned word for a repeating chord progression, like the 12-bar blues. My chords are a little weirder, using just intonation to find notes that don’t exist on the piano keyboard. Here the wonderful Jupiter Quartet plays a chaconne, but at the same time they are lost in a labyrinth. The chords keep returning, only to point in new directions. This is how I’ve felt the past year: stuck in a loop, but at the same time lost in a maze, desperately seeking the way out. At the center of this maze, like the Minotaur of Greek myth, lies a depiction of the coronavirus that has so profoundly changed our world. After this encounter—marked by strange, percussive sounds—the quartet traces their way, like following Ariadne’s thread, back through the labyrinth.

For Joy of Regathering, this 20-minute composition is split into two, to portray the microscopic world of bacteria and viruses (part two, “Fragments of Life”), and the birth of planets and stars (part four, “Journeying the Cosmos”). Around the quartet, the story of human culture (“We the animals”) opens with music from classical Indian, Chinese, Western and African-American traditions, including rock, jazz and free improvisation. As our journey goes farther back through time to the beginning of the universe, improvisation becomes more and more prominent, featuring theremins, Indian alap, and experimental electronic music. Finally, all the musicians combine as our human voyagers onstage witness light from 13 billion years ago, brought to us by the James Webb Space Telescope.