Composer’s Note:

The potential of certain types of music to double as ritual experiences for their performers and listeners fascinates me as a composer. Whether a piece of court music from the Japanese gagaku tradition or a concert work by Scriabin or Messiaen, I have always found myself particularly drawn to music imbued with a ceremonial or meditative quality. Fire Chorus represents an effort to engage with these traditions within the context of my own musical language. While my music might ordinarily be defined by its tendency to shift abruptly between highly contrasting but interrelated textures, in writing Fire Chorus I sought to approach the unfolding of the musical material in a more restrained, deliberate manner, including an uncharacteristically liberal use of stasis and silence. Contributing to the work’s ritualistic atmosphere, the ensemble is divided into several subgroups”most obviously, the two antiphonally positioned horn trios”that, while not entirely segregated from one another, are each assigned a distinct role from which they rarely stray. Fire Chorus was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for its 2017 season with the generous support of the Merwin Geffen, M.D. and Norman Solomon, M.D. New Commissions Fund and was completed in New York on March 14, 2017.