Orchestration
flute, clarinet, violin, cello

Duration
9 minutes

Premiere
Premiered by Hub New Music 2021

Program Note
While We Seek… is inspired by two American folk songs, Hard Times Come Again No More by Stephen Foster and Down in the Valley by Jimmie Tarlton. Both songs have a bittersweetness to them, as the singer describes their current troubled situation, while also hoping for a better future, not knowing what that will be. In Hard Times, this difficulty is more abstract and is found in a formless entity. Stephen Foster brilliantly does not name what the problem is, but leaves it open for the listener to project what is troubling them into the song. Down in the Valley, on the other hand, is much more specific. Here, the singer is in a jail cell singing of an unrequited love. It is made even more touching with it is lullaby-like melody in a major key.

While We Seek... does not set the songs in a traditional way, rather, I have attempted to pull the melodies out from an ever-changing cloud of sound. The songs are the reverberation of this cloud, falling in and out of it as the piece changes shape.