Swell (2025)
Orchestra - picc.2.3.2.bcl.2.cbsn—4.3.3.1.—timp—3perc.—hp—strings
Duration: 14.5’
Premiered by Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra and Tobias Furholt (cond.), 8/13/2025 at Klein Music Tent, Aspen CO. Commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival as Winner of the 2024 Druckman Prize in Music Composition.
Program note
I have always lived near bodies of water - the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, Houston’s Brays Bayou, the Pacific Ocean - and feel connected to water via memory, as if somehow water was always the context, or backdrop, against any given life experience. Houston was a waterlogged city, from floods, the humidity, and intense, torrential rain. In my childhood neighborhood growing up in San Diego, there was a little creek where I used to catch toads, small fish, and crawdads for fun. When writing Swell, I noticed that water is a common lens through which I measure my own nostalgia, maybe because water is always flowing and containing life. After all, they say that a river never remains the same river.
When I think of water, the first most instinctual thoughts that come to mind are images of waves, shimmering light, gentleness, incredible force, being a teenager sitting with my friends while eating sandwiches on a cliff in Del Mar overlooking the beach, Schubert (thinking of the Rauschen or “noise” from the babbling brook in Die Schon Mullerin); I think of cyclicality (what goes up comes down), whether it’s the tides, moisture evaporating and condensing into clouds, or the uncontrolled release of energy into our atmosphere. I think of the time a bully at summer camp tried to drown me in the community (I was 6); I remember the burning sensation of carbon dioxide in my lungs, of my ears, nose, and eyes forcefully exposed to the pool water. This was the first time I experienced water as a sort of monstrosity, an agent of asphyxiation. Of course, I had no language to describe these feelings at the time, but I was well aware of its power and intensity.
When I think of home, my thoughts immediately drift towards the ocean. I grew up in San Diego, California in an inland suburb not too far away from the Pacific. When experiencing pain, joy, anxiety, or loneliness, the ocean was there for me. When celebrating with friends and family, the ocean was there too. Whether alone or with others, I would park on a side street in Del Mar and walk to the grassy lot at Powerhouse Park to watch the sun set quietly, and after descending, I would watch and listen to the waves. In the darkness of night, the whitewash and intermittent pops of sea foam punctuated the air in the most fleeting ways. I did this so often that to me, the ocean is a symbol of home, peace, and personal identity.
Swell is a love letter to the ocean, an acknowledgment of its beauty, its monstrosity, its otherworldly qualities, its incessant motor, its tremendous physical force, its salinity, and at times, its stillness.