Flute (Alto Flute)

Oboe (English Horn)

Clarinet in Bb

Bass Clarinet

Bassoon

Horn

Trumpet

Trombone

Percussion (2 players) - Bass Drum, Crotales, Finger Cymbals (2), Mark Tree, Rain Stick, Sizzle Cymbal, Sleigh Bells, Suspended Cymbals (3), Tam-tam, Vibraphone

Piano

2 Violins

Viola

Cello

Double Bass

As Brightness Is To Time was written in 2025 for Alarm Will Sound and premiered during my residency at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Knowing that several of the ensemble's players, like me, came up through jazz, I was eager to let that shared vocabulary step forward in a way I hadn't quite allowed myself before.

My earliest ideas for the piece took shape in December 2024, oriented toward a kind of jazz-inflected energy and optimism — the vitality of a room like the Bluewhale, a Los Angeles club that closed during the pandemic, and the deep listening and communal attention such spaces cultivate. Then the fires came, and that orientation became impossible to sustain. Shuttered venues, impermanence, vulnerability — the very language I'd been reaching for started to resonate in a much darker key, and I couldn't continue down the path I'd laid out for myself.

Over the following months the piece transformed at its root. I discarded nearly seven minutes of finished music as the work reoriented itself around a different emotional center — one concerned as much with mourning as with attention, with the cost of noticing too late, with what it means to bear witness to loss without turning away.

Rebirth crept in alongside that mourning. Structurally, the piece stages this by letting one musical identity erode while another takes shape beneath it — not as a clean handoff, but as something new growing directly out of what's been damaged or given up. The music, in that sense, mirrors a landscape of destruction and renewal held at once.

As Brightness Is To Time is ultimately my reckoning with how art responds once optimism can no longer stand on its own — with what it means for attention to include grief, and for renewal to carry the weight of what's been lost. Even so, the piece holds onto the possibility that care, presence, and listening can still conjure something vital out of the aftermath.