Flute (Bass Flute)

Clarinet in Bb (Bass Clarinet)

Violin

Cello

Percussion (Crotales, Vibraphone, Wind Gong, 6 Assorted Metals (High), 6 Assorted Metals (Low)*

Piano

*Specific instrumentation is left to the performer’s discretion. At the premiere, 3 finger cymbals, 3 triangles, and 6 aluminum pipes were used.

The title of this piece comes from Stefan George's "Journey Through Snow," from his collection Year of the Soul, a meditation on solitude, memory, and ephemerality, a prayer from a heart bracing for departure. It is a fitting emblem for a piece that is, at its core, a reflection on memory, on the harder and more human kind of remembering, the sort that arrives in fragments, dissolves before it can be held, and must be earned back one shard at a time.

Structurally, Veils of Azure works in reverse, its main theme gathered slowly out of fragments that surface, falter, and slip under again, the way a mind circles something meaningful yet just out of reach. Only at the climax does the theme arrive whole, and there the piece does not rush past it. The arrival is drawn out, cathartic, given room to be felt in full before it too must pass. What follows is a return: the opening fragments come back, transformed, no longer straining, now at rest. There is grief in watching memory falter, but the piece insists on a gentler truth as well, that nothing truly loved is ever wholly lost. It simply passes into safekeeping, held by those who carry it forward.

Water runs beneath all of this, audible in textures indebted to Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau, to Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Ondine, and to Takemitsu's I Hear the Water Dreaming. But water is also the piece's central image. It is always moving and always, somehow, the same water, older than any memory it is asked to hold, older than the earth it moves across, older even than the sun that warms it. It carries with it the old mythic weight of purification and rebirth, the sense that immersion is itself a kind of return.

Your magic broke when veils of azure blew
From green of graves and certainty of grace.
Now let me — gone so soon — a little space,
As to the heart of sorrow, pray to you.

To rapid parting you must needs agree,
For riven is the water's frozen rind,
Perhaps a bud will be tomorrow's find!
I cannot take you into spring with me.

— Stefan George