Forking Paths (2012-19, rev. 2020)
First performance
Luzerne Music Center Faculty Recital, July 30, 2021
Alice Jones, flute
Emily DiAngelo, oboe
Sergiy Divornichenko, clarinet
Heather Johnson, horn
Sandra Nikolajevs, bassoon
Luzerne Music Center Faculty Recital, July 30, 2021
Alice Jones, flute
Emily DiAngelo, oboe
Sergiy Divornichenko, clarinet
Heather Johnson, horn
Sandra Nikolajevs, bassoon
Instrumentation
Flute, doubling piccolo
Oboe
Clarinet in B-flat, doubling bass clarinet (optional)
Horn in F
Bassoon
Flute, doubling piccolo
Oboe
Clarinet in B-flat, doubling bass clarinet (optional)
Horn in F
Bassoon
Duration
18 minutes
I. The thing with feathers
II. Sunshine seemed like gold
III. When you have forgotten
IV. Tell all my friends
18 minutes
I. The thing with feathers
II. Sunshine seemed like gold
III. When you have forgotten
IV. Tell all my friends
Perusal score
Purchase (available after August 1, 2021)
Program note
I began writing Forking Paths long before I thought of myself as a “composer.” Ideas that eventually evolved into the first three movements came to me in snippets over the course of several years while I was rehearsing and traveling with the quintet Fiati Five, especially the range of colors of the woodwind quintet and it sonorous power. Concurrently, I was also teaching music appreciation at several colleges, and very un-quintet-like 20th-century repertoire from my teaching syllabi took root in my imagination, particularly minimalism and prison songs recorded at Parchman Farm State Penitentiary in the 1930s and 40s. It wasn’t until 2019 that I sat down to pull these ideas into complete movements or explore what these ideas were saying for me.
The title of each movement is a reference to a poetic text that explores yearning and being temporally unstuck in one’s emotions—dreaming of, longing for, or anticipating an emotional arrival in a completely different space than the one someone is in right now. In writing the work, I was exploring different kinds of stretto, leader-follower, and phased textures, with each instrument moving in its own musical arc that only comes into focus with the others for fleeting moments of unity. The first movement, “The thing with feathers,” refers to Emily Dickinson’s poem No. 254 (1891)—the “thing” is hope. The second movement is inspired by Langston Hughes’ blues-structured “Po’ Boy Blues” (1926) and the broken promise of the Great Migration (“When I was home de / Sunshine seemed like gold”), to the point that the speaker ultimately feels so “weary / I wish I’d never been born.” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” (1945) has haunted me since I first read it, the foretelling of what it will feel like after a romance has died. The final movement, “Tell all my friends,” comes from the second stanza of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (after 1865). In this passage, I am perpetually seized by the gravity of the divide between the where the speaker is in that moment compared with where they dream of being (“carry me home”)—and everything that would have defined the antebellum Black experience in America that would necessitate such dreaming—as well as the powerlessness of the speaker in their journey (“If you get there before I do”) but their unshakeable faith in the connections they have with the people that matter to them, knowing that they’ll wait an eternity to see them again if need be (“Tell all of my friends that I’m coming there, too”).
The title of each movement is a reference to a poetic text that explores yearning and being temporally unstuck in one’s emotions—dreaming of, longing for, or anticipating an emotional arrival in a completely different space than the one someone is in right now. In writing the work, I was exploring different kinds of stretto, leader-follower, and phased textures, with each instrument moving in its own musical arc that only comes into focus with the others for fleeting moments of unity. The first movement, “The thing with feathers,” refers to Emily Dickinson’s poem No. 254 (1891)—the “thing” is hope. The second movement is inspired by Langston Hughes’ blues-structured “Po’ Boy Blues” (1926) and the broken promise of the Great Migration (“When I was home de / Sunshine seemed like gold”), to the point that the speaker ultimately feels so “weary / I wish I’d never been born.” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” (1945) has haunted me since I first read it, the foretelling of what it will feel like after a romance has died. The final movement, “Tell all my friends,” comes from the second stanza of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (after 1865). In this passage, I am perpetually seized by the gravity of the divide between the where the speaker is in that moment compared with where they dream of being (“carry me home”)—and everything that would have defined the antebellum Black experience in America that would necessitate such dreaming—as well as the powerlessness of the speaker in their journey (“If you get there before I do”) but their unshakeable faith in the connections they have with the people that matter to them, knowing that they’ll wait an eternity to see them again if need be (“Tell all of my friends that I’m coming there, too”).