Ephemerality in Epilogue

For my senior recital, the capstone project of my undergraduate studies at the Blair School of Music, I wanted to compose a piece that would conclude the program and also make use of the beautiful organ in the Steve and Judy Turner Recital Hall - an instrument which I greatly admired, but had only heard performed on rare occasions and which I myself had never previously attempted to write for. In giving myself such a daunting task, I turned to designing an elaborate process-driven structure based around two concepts: Bach-style chorale writing and Danish composer Per Nørgård’s “infinity series” (which you can read more about in my 8/6/21 blog post or in his own article, Inside a Symphony). By first writing a continuous cyclical 4-part chorale and then segmenting it into ten discrete pieces, I was able to serialize a ‘shuffling’ of these segments according to the infinity series (but reversed, as to create a sense of chaos coming to convergence rather than a unity gradually expanding without bounds). With that, I had the simple outline of a long period of extensively jumbled chorale segments that slowly came into focus before giving a single unaltered statement of the complete chorale.

This, however, only sparked my desire to further exacerbate this sense of ambiguous fragments subtly forming clarity, which I accomplished by then creating four more layers to the texture. These layers all follow the infinity series exactly like the first, but do so at their own unique periodicity, transposition, and rhythmic identity (giving each layer out an increasing sense of distance or separation from the original layer). This complication was also done with the instrument in mind, as the organ is able to sustain these multiple layers (or threads, rather) in the combination of two hands and the foot pedals. Finally, with this elaborate blueprint completely established, I was able to compose the entire piece in a fraction of the time it took to create the plan, only adding in non-chord tones in the final complete statement and a dramatically prolonged cadence at the end to further delay the final resolution.

This is how Ephemerality in Epilogue came to be. To date, it is without doubt one of my most convolutedly conceived pieces, despite the original simplicity of its elements. Described as “Messiaenic” by one of my teachers, the piece will challenge listeners as it seems to aimlessly wander for minutes on end, but eventually reward them with a slow-burning, sublime lucidity as the true chorale emerges in its final moments.

Performance Time: 13’00”