I was not immune to this allure. My effort was a 10-minute tone poem titled “…a slightly greener thing…”, the title borrowed from a passage early in American author Richard Powers’ book “The Overstory”:

“A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we would drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.”

At the center of the orchestral piece is a gentle, quietly joyful tune that evokes the elemental care and tenderness the world has for its living things—a world not indifferent to life but supremely hospitable to it, actively bringing about its existence and fostering its evolution and flourishing across four billion years.

Though the original piece didn’t gain a champion to perform it, there was much in it I was proud of and thought should live beyond this first fruitless foray into orchestral writing.

The idea to write a set of variations for a smaller ensemble based on this tune came a few years later. It is likewise inspired by the borrowed-from passage from Powers—the variations akin to all the different ways the world “sings” to us, showing its care for us through gifts of food, water, shelter, medicine, weather—giving of its very body for us to live. I thought perhaps meditating on the idea—that this earth is not indifferent to us, but loves us, wants us to be and do well—and expressing that across two-dozen variations might help that message sink in, inviting reflection on how we can show our appreciation in return.

Last month, the Portland Saxophone Ensemble brought this set of variations to vivid life at Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival in a performance warm, effervescent, patient, and finally impassioned, an experience you can take part in below:

This music travels from a sweet and simple rendering of the original tune to a rocking choral-like finale via many shades of joy, contemplation, gratefulness, challenge, loss, refinding a way forward, and, if such a thing is possible, some kind of humbled glory. Along the way, I ask the ensemble to evoke the wind, a mountain-distant hunting party, an organ, two kinds of church services, stargazing, the experience of eating too-hot pizza, and a horseback dash homeward.

While writing the variations, I learned of several pregnancies among my family and friends. Some of the variations are dedicated to and named for the then-pending child/children, with variations assigned according to which one I was writing when I got the news. Other variations are named for and evocative of places in my pacific northwest home.

The process of writing the variations and their overall structuring—most closely akin to a combo of sitting on the floor with a glue stick making a collage while playing a game of telephone—is worthy fodder for a later discussion. For now, I’ll leave you with the full list of variations with a personalized note for each. (Note that the above performance includes only 16 of the 24 variations.)

Variations (annotated):

1. Hundred-Acre Woods (where many of us begin our relationship with the woods)

2. Double Dutch (for my twin nieces, Maizee and Samara)

3. Upper Lostine (far and away Oregon’s most beautiful country, off-stage saxophones)

4. Waltz (for Norah—Miyazaki/Hisaishi vibes)

5. Budget Bolero (because who doesn’t love a musical easter egg?)

6. Fire and Brimstone (because we need some breakneck, fiery music)

7. The Flentrop Organ (Seattle organ that’s blown me away more than once)

8. Sashay (for Silvia)

9. Memaloose Hills (spring wildflowers in the Columbia River Gorge)

10. Hot potato/pizza (reference to a favorite pizza shop right next door to…)

11. Goodfoot (…a well-loved dance hall down the street from a…)

12. Tabor Circuit (…breakneck bike race on an extinct volcano in the middle of PDX)

13. Light in the dark (first major break in momentum, moving into an unsure space)

14. Sunrise at Midnight (for Jemma—Sunrise is a location on Mt Rainier)

15. The Original (finally, the fully clothed theme)

16. New leaf (for Steffand)

17. Bach, fastforward (homage to Bach solo partitas, some of the most elegant music written)

18. Gallop (unbridled joy)

19. Ivory, then Ebony (two flavors of church music, constrasted)

20. Slap happy (a fun, percussive, slap-tongue-driven variation)

21. Bounce (for baby Pary)

22. Essence (three phases, ABA, cluster harmony, home depart return)

23. Spectral (two saxophones reading eachother’s minds, finishing eachother’s sentences)

24. Burn Bright (apotheosis, a celebration of who we each can be if we listen to and trust that quiet internal voice)

I am a saxophonist and so are many of my readers (you!). Over the next several days, some of you will find yourselves in Columbus, OH at The Ohio State University participating in the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) national conference—four days full of performances, masterclasses, workshops, and socializing.

Unfortunately I can’t be there this year, but two of my pieces will be there in my stead!

• The University of Tennessee Chattanooga saxophone studio will be performing Romp, a rousing opener (or closer!) for saxophone ensemble—3.5 minutes of high-energy fun. Friday @ 2:30PM Weigel in Auditorium.

• Dr. Jessica Dodge-Overstreet is giving the premiere performance of blossom, behold, bruise, become—a piece for soprano saxophone and piano. Saturday @ 5:30 Recital Hall 120. What Dr. Dodge-Overstreet had to say about this work in her program notes:

“blossom behold bruise become uses more modern compositional language, but is still tinged with nostalgia. This piece shows off the range of color a soprano saxophone can achieve and blends virtuosity with heartfelt expression. Composer, saxophonist, and urban planner Shane Valle and I also met during our student years in Oregon. Since then, his poignant writing style has matured and been featured on programs across the country. “This music is addressed to the child in each of us and hopefully, with its aspect of earnest tenderness, deeply soothes the parts of us that were in some way not able to fully blossom—because we were not enough or we were too much or not the right shape or had to take on too much too soon.” This piece represents our collective journeys toward self-actualization and inspires us to push forward through the difficulties of our lives and our time.”

If you’re hearing things you like in my music, you can find a list of my works written for saxophone here - from quartets to solo works to saxophone choirs to reed quintets. If anything sounds interesting, respond to this email or shoot me a message on instagram @shanevallemusic

If you happen to be in Portland tonight like I am, the Portland State University saxophone quartet will be giving a full performance of my piece Move With Me as a part of their Wind Ensemble’s winter concert. The ensemble previewed the piece in a performance last week with the funky third movement and the crowd loved their work! I’ll leave you with their energetic traversal:

When I was old enough to stay somewhat still and mostly quiet for more than 10 minutes, my parents would bring me to the thrice-weekly sessions at the small bible class our family attended, hosted in a converted storefront in south Seattle.

Though I was bathed in their singing from before my earliest memories through to my undergraduate, I’ve struggled to find overt traces of this foundational musical experience in my own compositions. How is it that it hasn’t left its fingerprints all over my music-writing instincts? Or has it?

During this last decade of society-wide reflection on identity (and backlash against such reflection), I have thought a lot about my own identity as a child of a mixed-race marriage. I grew up in spaces black, white, and/or so mixed that such considerations were irrelevant—a lovely childhood, really.

Recently, (and in artistic and musical spaces in particular) there has been a demand for “elevating black and brown voices.” That demand seems to be for a specific idea of what black and brown contributions should look/sound like; the question of my musical influences never made me curious or troubled me until the zeitgeist was that a person who looked like me’s music should sound a certain way to be valued.

Silly or not, the last few years has set me on a journey to better account for my musical roots.

I’m a latecomer to writing music. I had my first premiere less than five years ago, after going to grad school in an unrelated field, after establishing a career as an urban planner, after buying a house. My path here was circuitous, beginning with a promising start as a successful high school saxophonist, getting scared of the struggles and potential deprivations of a career in music, doing something else for a decade, and realizing that music could, should, and needed to be a significant part of my life. My disjointed musical development separated me from that earliest musical thread, rooted in gospel music.

My self-directed approach to learning music has been highly cerebral: listening to, dissecting, and reconstructing the music I have come to love—the late-romantic to late-20th century canon of classical music. In contrast to the intuitive way our baker’s dozen choir felt for the right harmonies, melodic embellishments, number of repetitions, and ad libs (everything was learned by ear), the concert music I studied was bound by careful rules and forms. In search for gospel music influences in my own music—in an embarrassing and tautological effort to prove (at least to myself) I was “black enough”—I realized that while my approach to writing music relied on the models of classical music I had studied, the musical material and instincts—the individual’s sense of what the next right thing to do in the music is—that animated these models often relied on something much older and (previously) unexamined.

As I searched for these influences, I began to notice many moments that called back to something old for me—harmonies, vocal melodic shapes, oddly improvisatory sections. They weren’t in every piece I had written, and they were often brief sections, but they were almost always at deeply felt or pivotal moments in the music, somehow set off from what was around them.

There seem to be three tell-tales of this style as it shows up in my music. These sections are largely:

• Homophonic, which more or less means everyone’s part is aligned and they are moving together as opposed to a more complex musical texture where each voice is doing something different.

• Rhythmically irregular, in that there is a sense that the music is improvisatory or being made right there and then. This is probably an emulation of the choir director giving each entrance, judging the length of each silence and sound anew each performance.

• Harmonically straightforward (with some exceptions), reflecting the simple harmony in thirds that choirs tend to sing in.

Move With Me: II. Coda

Right away you have the warm, choral benediction from the three lower saxophones, playing together in simple harmony but in a somewhat uneven rhythm. The call and response between a soloist and a chorus (in this case between the soprano and the alto, tenor, and baritone) is another landmark of gospel music.

Functionally, this is the end of this movement and a moment that consolidates all the distance traveled since its beginning; the warm benediction is a distant callback to an earlier section in the piece. I like to imagine the satisfaction of that recognition washing over the audience when three (visible) audience members tilt their heads all at the exact same moment right around 00:25 in the video.

You can find the lovely full performance by the University of Washington saxophone studio here.

A Sunward Tilt - transition to recapitulation

It should have been obvious where this one was coming from when I was writing it; I had a ton of trouble notating it in a way that would be intelligible to classically trained musicians, including myself, coming up with three different ways of writing the same thing (and the premiering ensemble asked for a fourth to further clarify!). It is supposed to feel slightly off-kilter, but at the same time have that sassy groove and hair-raising declamatory rightness that gospel music does so well. Listening to it now, I can clearly see in my minds eye the choir director up front, giving each entrance.

As for its function in the piece, it’s a moment completely out of left field, just before the final climactic recapitulation—a teaser, a giant upbeat to the recap, making the audience wait just a bit and wonder before diving in. In no other part of the piece do I write something similar.

You can find the full performance of A Sunward Tilt (one of my favorite pieces!) by Fivemind Reeds here.

as we atomize: III. echoes

This music is from the very end of a recently completed and yet-to-be-premiered saxophone quartet (so the MIDI video above will have to do). I spent hours fussing over the notation of this section, similarly to those few bars in A Sunward Tilt. I realize now that what I was trying to do was notate and replicate the capriciously deliberate control of a choir director giving each entrance. Almost but not quite realizing what I was trying to do, I left a note for performers about the “admittedly fussy” notation:

“If you like, once you understand the pacing and relationships established by the admittedly fussy notation, feel free to set strict adherence to notation aside in favor of something a bit more organic. Alto, tenor, and bari just have to agree with one another.”

The harmonic language starts out a bit crunchy, but the effect is that same perfect placement—that properly judged “just-so-ness”—especially when the harmony begins to warm up as the section progresses.

That careful control is essential to the musical function of this passage, which lays out a solid, if stilted, path to follow in the wake of the wild darkness of the 20 minutes of preceding music. The small swelling that finishes the work is a sorrowful look backward and hopeful look forward that will probably make me tear up when I hear it in performance, made all the more affecting because of the restraint just before.

No one else may recognize these moments as connected to gospel music. But for me, they take me right back; they make me smile; I close my eyes, nod, and I experience a deep sense of rightness coming over me.

Does this source of many of my musical moments make me/my music black enough? That’s a dumb, centuries-old question that won’t stop being asked just because I’m complaining about it.

More importantly/interestingly is to ask how does understanding one’s influences help you as an artist, or just as a human? Has anyone found that it ruins some of the magic of what we’re doing? Or does it helps you go even deeper into it?

Thank you for following me on this personal musicological journey! I hope you’re inspired to take a few moments to reflect on where you come from and what you’re made up of.

And in case you missed it (I did, so you probably did, too!) last November, the Montana State University Saxophone Studio made the pages of my piece Breathe, Set, Play glow with their organ-like sound. Led by Dr. Wonki Lee, Assistant Professor of Saxophone, the MSU saxophone studio really impressed me with their North American Saxophone Association appearance in spring 2025; I’m very fortunate to have the studio bringing my music to life.

Pets can also teach us how to say goodbye. And how to live better before we have to.

I grew up a dog person. When my girlfriend moved in with me last year, she brought her cat Dapper Dan to live with us. Wary of the aloofness cats, I mostly kept my distance, which fortuitously allowed Dapper the space to get comfortable with me and approach on his own. I grew to enjoy his gruff but affable demeanor; he was a very vocal guy and always greeted you verbally when you walked into the same room he was in.

On his side of things, he wasn’t so sure about my saxophone playing and would often run and hide when I started to make noise. But eventually he got so comfortable he would lay on the couch near me while I’d practiced, becoming a discerning listener, chiming in with a grunt when my intonation was awry or my vibrato’s amplitude was becoming a tad too French. He once sat through a full 2-hour saxophone quartet rehearsal a half a room away, asleep the entire time.

Many of the lessons pets provide come as they leave or after they are gone. This past Thursday morning, Dapper Dan was back to back with me sitting on the floor as we each contemplated our favorite things: he the sunlight with his eyes half-closed; me the implied polyphony in a Bach Partita. Come evening, he was suddenly, devastatingly, irretrievably no longer here.

Though he’d been living with me less than a year, it felt like our home’s spirit, its latent animacy—the potential that he could be anywhere or suddenly enter any room and it would be that much more alive—had been snuffed out. An unremitting emotional heaviness settled on the household; my girlfriend and I spent many minutes aimlessly shuffling room to room as if physically stunned. His absence viscerally brought home what we’re all told but don’t always know: what makes spaces, concepts, content, music, life, and anything else matter is not the forms themselves, but who and what is moving through them or in them.

As ever, music is a response to life and can be a way to process what’s happening. I wrote all this as program notes to accompany the first sketch of a piece I wrote less than 24 hours after Dapper Dan’s passing. It will eventually contain two parts: an expression of his character and the process of losing him. The section on loss is almost totally realized, while the half illustrating him in full flush only exists as a couple loosely connected musical ideas not fit to share; he’s too painfully proximate at the same time that he’s completely unreachable to consider setting him back to life in music. And I can’t see the full lesson yet; mostly things are miserable; much too close and too soon. Even so, the “loss” music I’ve written mostly evokes the Seussian “don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened”, a smile or laugh through tears, a strong ray of horizontal sunlight beneath a sky of dark clouds.

Early on in meeting Dapper, I fashioned a derisive little tune I would sing to/at him, adjusting the lyrics according to my or his perceived mood—a jauntily stylized version of the horn solo that opens Brahms’ second piano concerto that humorously undermines the nobility of the original—which you’ll hear at the beginning of my piece, too, once the whole thing is finished.

This, in a few guises, becomes the primary material of the piece.

I’ll leave you with a mockup of the second half, scored for saxophone quartet for now. It’s not sophisticated, there are musical cliches, it came out all at once. I’m mostly sharing this to provide permission to make something for an audience of one, or none, or for someone who can no long hear it. And then don’t be like me; be like Kurt Vonnegut and don’t share it, because the magic has already happened:

Even so, hopefully this leaves you with a desire to cherish and remember those important to you, too—and continue on your own path of becoming.

A little listener’s guide—you’ll hear:

• First, a stilted, uneven section that mirrors his heavy and often uneven tread as he made his way around the house. The stilted awkwardness is also evocative of the unpleasant anticipation of sitting in the pet hospital lobby waiting for news when you already knew

• Second, saying goodbye, joking sadly, his breathing and heart beat slowing and slowing. And then stopping, which moves directly into…

• Third, powerful, heartfelt, upward-surging music, as he’s literally and figuratively carried off—inexorable passing of time and life

• Fourth, left with wisps and memories.

The text of the video, more or less, is duplicated below and in my bio.

“Hi, my name is Shane Valle. I’m a composer, saxophonist, and urban planner living in Portland, Oregon. The music I write is inflected with the feelings and rhythms of pacific northwest life, which probably reflects that much of my musical thinking and writing ends up happening while I am out hiking in our wildernesses. At its best, my music tries to invoke and nourish what is tender, noble, and good in each of us.

Much of musical language falls on the conventional side of things, informed by classical music and gospel music traditions. If I had to try to place a finger on what is novel about my work, I think it actually comes from my urban planning background—which brings a zoomed-out, birds-eye perspective that is most concerned with how disparate elements can add up to a cohesive whole, how a composer and performers can take care of the long sonic dramatic arc that stretches across a piece of music, without which music dissolves into a series of unrelated episodes or monotony that fails to retain interest.

It’s easy to get lost in the swirl of soundbites, reels, and empty calories. With my music, I’m hoping to make the case for the deep, enduring gratification that comes from the long read, the multi-course meal, the long listen. We often entrust our time and attention to our technological overlords, corporations making a buck by promising us connection and opportunity while delivering a fractured and fractious civic space, addicting us to outrage and simple answers while stealing our sense of agency and purpose. I hope my music can provide an alternative you can feel good entrusting yourself to, a product whose only intent is to remind you of what you find foundationally important—family, community, generosity, connection to something larger than yourself— music that only seeks to return you to yourself.

If this ethos resonates with you, check out some of my music or drop me a line and let’s work on creating something together.”

2025 has been one of the most rewarding musical years of my life, in large part due to the generosity and collaborations of this newsletter’s readership (thank you!). I can’t highlight every lovely or fortunate instance from the year, but here are a handful that keep me warm in the December chill and that I will remember when I look back on musical 2025.

May: Premiere of A Sunward Tilt

In May of this year, Fivemind Reeds gave the premiere of A Sunward Tilt, a piece for reed quintet completed the year before and written with them in mind.

The piece (and their performance) achieves everything I want my music to: a perfect balance between aesthetic accessibility and expressive depth; music that evokes and reinforces what is tender, noble, and good in each of us; music that ties us to nature, the ebbing and flowing of it, and our proper place here - in awe and working to make the world a bit better. The magical way Fivemind suddenly lets the last minute of music melt away after the final climax still steals my breath, surprising me in the best way possible. With this piece, it’s almost true that if I never wrote anything else or had anything performed again, I would be totally musically happy.

February and August: Premieres abroad!

My music went overseas for the first time this year, and in the case of both pieces, both performances were also world premieres.

Rhapsody for Double Reeds

To be fair, the year’s first premiere wasn’t technically abroad, taking place in Ponce, PR as a part of Puerto Rico Double Reed Day 2025. Dr. Javier Rodriguez, friend and University of Idaho Professor of Bassoon was looking for music for two oboes and three bassoons to perform together; I delivered with the Rhapsody for Double Reeds. Following a successful premiere, one of the ensemble performers asked for a new arrangement for three oboes and two English horns which premiered this summer at the Fresno Summer Orchestra Academy.

Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet

For the second premiere abroad, nonesuch.reedquintet gave the first performance of Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet in Tangerang, Indonesia as a part of their six-week tour of southeast Asia during which they would give three more performances of the Suite.

In the last year, nonesuch has made fantastic recordings of two of my pieces for reed quintet, including the Suite and my first reed quintet, After Hours. They’ve been wonderful champions of my music and an exceptional addition to Oregon’s chamber music scene.

September: Portland Saxophone Ensemble live on the radio!

In September, radio host Christa Wessel invited the Portland Saxophone Ensemble to perform live on Portland’s All Classical Radio.

In addition to performing the finale of Morning Comes Always for live and radio audiences, I got to speak about my composition, about the saxophone’s place in classical music, and about the founding and purpose of the Portland Saxophone Ensemble. It was a bucket list experience and a delight to share some classical saxophone with an audience most familiar with the saxophone’s substantial contributions to jazz and popular music.

Seeds for the future

Everything that bore fruit this year had been somehow in the works for at least a year. I recently read a biography of a well-known composer who had premieres and performances of work after work delayed months and years beyond when the original commitment was made. It was a humbling and helpful reminder of what even an eminent composer can and can’t control.

What I can control is sowing seeds for the future. Here’s what’s in motion for next year:

• A scheduled premiere of a new piece for soprano saxophone and piano blossom behold bruise become given by Dr. Jessica Dodge-Overstreet at the North American Saxophone Alliance’s 2026 national conference. At the same event, Dr. Sean Fredenburg and the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga saxophone studio will also be giving a performance of my recently revised piece Romp.

• A completed final draft of a major new work for saxophone quartet in search of a name and a premiere date in 2026.

• A new Portland-based saxophone quartet (so new, we don’t even have a name yet…!), a vehicle for giving the saxophone a more established voice in Portland’s classical music scene.

• A possible collaboration with Portland-based animated film director R.J. Sullivan of Catch and Hatch Studios on a score for his latest animated film!

There’s still time for you to get some seeds in the ground for the new year, so don’t let the late hour deter you from even a small action that can ripple out into the future. If you’re at a loss, consider supporting the ensembles, musicians, and promoters that have supported me this year: Fivemind Reeds, nonesuch.reedquintet, Solstice Reed Quintet, Portland Saxophone Ensemble, Aruna Quartet; the saxophone studios of UW-Stevens Point, UT-Chattanooga, University of Washington, and Montana State University; the double reed studios of University of Idaho; Dr. Jessica Dodge-Overstreet, Dr. Sean Fredenburg, Dr. Wonki Lee, Dr. Rong-Huey Liu, Dr. Javier Rodriguez, Dr. Erik Steighner; Chamber Music Northwest, All Classical Radio.

And if you’re interested, my door is always open to discussing new projects and collaborations. Drop me a line here and say hello - lets make some musical plans for 2026!

Why?

I’m scared.

I have and have heard too many conflicting and strongly held feelings and ideas about what a “good” piece of saxophone music is to be able to go into writing one with the same relative naivete I do when composing for instruments not my own. My expectations are high, and I imagine those of other potential performers probably are, too (especially of a piece for saxophone coming from a saxophonist!).

To boot, my inherent style rests somewhere in the dip between two musical poles that seem to be popular: music that is complex/abstractly high-concept (in a way that’s often a substitute for something enjoyable to experience…) or, as my good friend likes to put it, Flash and Trash—ear candy that is the expressive equivalent of empty calories (subjective, yes, but that’s the business).

In the end, I’m concerned about acceptance, of putting a piece of myself out there and being welcomed by a community I am a part of but often feel in tension with.

This summer, a fellow (and much more accomplished) saxophonist, Dr. Jessica Dodge-Overstreet, shared some kind things about my piece Morning Comes Always, which the students of her saxophone studio at UW-Stevens Point had performed earlier in the year. Amidst her compliments, she off-handedly wished I had written something for solo saxophone and that, if it existed, she’d love to perform it.

Though the comment was innocuous, I felt my anxiety climb as the chorus of expectations started up in my head. Normally an opportunity to write music and perhaps have it performed elicits excitement. Not for me and not this time.

But something about having Jessica’s vote of confidence in music I had already written opened the door a tiny crack for me. I didn’t take the invitation right then, but the door would stay cracked long enough for me to work up the courage to hop on the phone a couple months later to discuss with Jessica what such a piece of music could look like.

We chatted about what horn she would like to play on (soprano) and what she found most enjoyable and unique about the soprano saxophone (the extremes of the instrument - the powerful and direct low end and the flute-like upper and altissimo registers). I came to the conversation with a couple of musical ideas and sketches I thought might resonate with her: first, some (intentionally) meandering unaccompanied music inspired by our shared appreciation of wandering in the outdoors and wide-open spaces; second, an eight-bar lullaby that had come from a composing exercise where I imagined what different loved ones might sing to me.

Jessica found both ideas of interest, but as a mother to a young son, the story behind the lullaby was more captivating. An excerpt from the program notes tells the tale:

The main “tune” emerged from an unusual-for-me composing exercise in which participants are directed to imagine what different people in your life might sing or hum or whistle to you. During one round of the exercise, I closed my eyes and imagined what my dad might sing to me. A simple and tender melody emerged, surprising me as those aren’t words or feelings I immediately associate with him. The tune was accompanied by an image of him holding me as a newborn, rocking me, looking down protectively. The rest of the piece grew from this kernel.

(don’t worry mom; there was a tune from you, too!)

The tune is almost embarrassingly simple and earnest. I had let it sit in my music “compost pile” for years because I didn’t know what to do with its simple power, which gave me chills and made me blush in embarrassment at the same time. Neither of us knew what would grow from this seed, but it seemed like it might go somewhere special.

Throughout the summer, I worked at the piece in fits and starts. As it grew and grew, it largely retained its earnest and naive character; my fears of not meeting expectations to compose something impressive and “mature” and serious and dazzling clamored to the fore.

Breakthroughs on the music came sporadically, but almost always seemed to happen while I was backpacking. For example, the tune that helped the piece turn the corner from a dark place it had gotten suck arrived suddenly as I entered a hidden and grand ancient arboreal proscenium.

And the name for the piece would fall from the sky as I made my way up a glacial valley.

Writing this music became a way to learn to better live with some of my musical and extra-musical anxieties—both in the writing of it and in realizing it was going to be an earnestly heart-forward piece whose content and arc itself seek to understand and soothe such anxieties.

Given the origin of the opening lullaby, I gave the piece the working title of “The Apple and its Tree”, a fortuitous naming as the whole roadmap of the piece would later be unfurled from this title’s analogy.

Full program notes:

An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but it does fall. And when it falls, it bruises, a necessary, if unpleasant, separation that’s part of becoming something else, something greater—maybe a tree, perhaps a home, maybe cider or sustenance.

We all emerge from childhood with figurative scars, pinches, puckers, and distortions in our character and personality—not necessarily due to something egregious happening, but because getting our needs met when we nor our caretakers (nor family nor friends) fully understand them has been and will always be an imperfectly met challenge. It’s a lifetime’s work to understand our inheritance of peculiarities, to navigate them (and help others navigate ours), and to make the most of the hand we’re dealt.

This music is addressed to the child in each of us and hopefully, with its aspect of earnest tenderness, deeply soothes the parts of us that were in some way not able to fully blossom—because we were not enough or we were too much or not the right shape or had to take on too much too soon.

The main “tune” emerged from an unusual-for-me composing exercise in which participants are directed to imagine what different people in your life might sing or hum or whistle to you. During one round of the exercise, I closed my eyes and imagined what my dad might sing to me. A simple and tender melody emerged, surprising me as those aren’t words or feelings I immediately associate with him. The tune was accompanied by an image of him holding me as a newborn, rocking me, looking down protectively. The rest of the piece grew from this kernel.

Allowing myself to be predominantly gentle, tender, and playful in my music is my step toward knowing and honoring yet-unfurled buds and blossoms. If there’s one listener who at piece’s end feels even a bit closer to that for themselves, that’s enough for me.

Earlier this month, I hit send on the final draft of the piece, whose official title is blossom, behold, bruise, become. Early next year, Dr. Jessica Dodge-Overstreet will give the premiere at the North American Saxophone Alliance national conference in Columbus, OH. I’m excited and anxious (but slightly more excited than anxious…!) to see Jessica bring her artistry to the music and very thankful for her trust in this collaboration.

A short round up:

If you missed it, the University of Washington Wind Ensemble saxophone section gave a lively performance of the first two movements of my saxophone quartet Move With Me at the tail end of October.

I’m especially fond of the fired-from-a-cannon energy they bring to the first movement and all the patience they bring to the second movement’s (my favorite of the piece) phrases and silences—enough to let the music breathe and create the spacious atmosphere that is a 180-degree contrast to the first movement, a sign of mature artistry.

On the same day, Dr. Erik Steighner and the South Sound Saxophone Ensemble gave a repeat performance of Morning Comes Always for saxophone ensemble. South Sound—the ensemble I wrote Morning Comes Always for—continues to make the piece their own, giving a magnificent and energetic rendering of the work’s final movement. Catch the archive of their livestream below.

Rounding out this newsletter with a bit of whimsy, tis the season for gingerbread-based construction!

During a lunch break, coworkers and I assembled simulacra of various landmarks from around Portland, OR from gingerbread, icing, and bring-your-own toppings. It was a competition but I think all walked away winners, with a fair share of sugar and sticky fingers.

I love hearing from you all, so: you be the judge and respond with your favorite above confection (there is a right answer…!) and any other thoughts or year-end reflections you’ve got!

Move With Me, for saxophone quartet
UW Wind Ensemble Saxophones
1:30PM—Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington, FREE

First up at 1:30PM will be my piece for saxophone quartet Move With Me, performed as a part of the University of Washington Wind Ensemble’s fall chamber music concert. The piece is a three-movement, 13-minute tour through extroversion, introversion, and their co-existence, told through sometimes-fluid, sometimes-stilted song and dance. Movement 1 sparkles with an oft-over-the-top minimalist energy while movement 2 (the heart of the matter for me) stops and starts contemplatively before achieving an emotional outpouring. Movement 3 finally grooves with the energy and gravitas of both.

The performing quartet is made up of the saxophone section of the UW Wind Ensemble (of which I was a proud member for 3 years!).

Somewhat uniquely at UW, individual sections of the wind ensemble, before sharing a stage together as a 40+ piece ensemble, must put on a concert entirely of chamber music. Making music in small groups cultivates (and demands) a kind of musical sensitivity and democracy it’s almost impossible to learn as a soloist or member of a larger group (a band or orchestra) but that is required for the highest level of music making in a large ensemble. It’s a tradition I’m proud to be a part of and even more proud to have some of my music on the program.

Morning Comes Always, for saxophone ensemble: Mvt. IV.
Dr. Erik Steighner + South Sound Saxophone Ensemble
3PM—Lagerquist Concert Hall, Pacific Lutheran University, FREE
Livestream

At 3PM at Pacific Lutheran University, you’ll have Dr. Erik Steighner leading the South Sound Saxophone Ensemble through it’s 10th anniversary concert(!). For the concert program, Dr. Steighner polled the ensemble members from over the years asking them what their favorite pieces were. South Sound premiered my piece Morning Comes Always last October, filling Lagerquist Hall with organ-like grandeur, ensemble members giving it their all through 18 minutes of music that charts a path from darkness, through midnight, and into the morning sun. I’m proud that in the voting, the piece rose to the top, through 9 years of other programs and fine music making to show up as the penultimate offering on Sunday’s concert.

If you drive quickly and you’re lucky with traffic (a suspect proposition on a Sunday afternoon…), you might be able to catch both! I still haven’t figured out how or if I’ll be able to split the difference given obligations down in Portland. However, both sets of performers are worthy of your time and ears, wonderful and gracious musicians who would appreciate your audience if you’re convenient to Seattle or Tacoma.

I’ll leave you with a few kind things audience members have told me about these pieces, words I hold onto when doubt creeps in:

“When your music swells up suddenly like that, it always brings tears to my eyes.”

“It’s like slipping into a warm bath.”

“Your use of tone painting makes me think of what Sibelius might have written had he written for saxophone.”

“This is my favorite piece written for the saxophone in the last 10 years.”

“As far as I’m concerned, your piece was the highlight of the evening.”

A post-post baseball note:

I don’t pay much attention to sports. However. As a reader on Tuesday morning, you have the privilege of knowing the outcome of the Mariners-Blue Jays game that will send one of those teams to the World Series. As the writer typing on Monday morning, I’ll have to wait several more hours to find out. But waiting for the Mariners to make it big—and having your hopes built up and dashed year after year—has been a way of life for, well, my whole life!

On our program is the finale of my piece Morning Comes Always as well as Bela Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances in an arrangement by friend and fellow saxophonist Will Pyle.

Portland Saxophone Ensemble is sharing the hour with local vocalist Luigi Boccia.

Hope you’re all having a graceful slide into fall. I’m trying to get out into the woods and mountains a few more times before the cold, dark, and wet closes the season out.

What music are folks listening to these days? What are you most looking forward to in autumn? Most importantly, do you have any good Halloween costume ideas for me to steal???

I would love to see your face! Come for our free Prelude concert at 7PM and stay for Chamber Music Northwest’s main event: Powerhouse Strings: Mendelssohn’s Octet and More (concert info and tickets for sale here).

This will be the third year in a row Portland Saxophone Ensemble has appeared at Chamber Music Northwest’s annual summer festival. It’s always a pleasure to surprise audience members—expecting to hear jazz, pop, or rock from a group of saxophones—with thoughtful (and hopefully refined) takes on the standard classical repertoire and new classical music. The Ensemble has grown a ton since its founding in 2018—from a rotating gaggle of mostly students to a consistent core membership of professional and semi-professional musicians, bringing together some of the best in classical saxophone the Portland-area has to offer.

Generously, multiple iterations of this ensemble have championed my music for saxophone ensemble, allowing me to experiment with and refine my music even as we approach a concert date. Their patience and collaboration have made sure I’m putting my best musical foot forward when I am finally ready to share my pieces with other ensembles.

For chamber wind players out there, take a look at my small but mighty (and growing!) catalogue of works. I’ve got a few things on the way, including a new project for saxophone quartet, something for piano-accompanied saxophone, and unaccompanied flute. Keep an eye out!

Hope everyone is getting lots of R&R this summer! My newish piece for reed quintet A Sunward Tilt continues to be my summer anthem—this year and probably every year after! That surprisingly elegiac ending (props to Fivemind Reeds for finding something in my music I didn’t know about!) gets me in the feels every time.

Here’s to well-crafted and -executed plans with room for summer serendipity!

Skip to the recording of Rhapsody for Double Reeds

Following the partial premiere of Rhapsody for Double Reeds in Puerto Rico this February, Dr. Rong-Huey Liu - one of the performers and guest artists of Puerto Rico Double Reed Day - had a fun challenge and request for me: could I rearrange the Rhapsody to be performed for a different instrumentation at a summer orchestral academy?

I leapt at the chance to rework the music—from the original arrangement for 2 oboes and 3 bassoons to 3 oboes and 2 english horns. Though both ensembles include oboes, changing out the bassoons for english horns presented very different opportunities. And challenges:

By collapsing the musical range available (with an ensemble of bassoons and oboes, I could write from almost the bottom octave on piano all the way to the piano’s top register; an ensemble of oboes and english horns has a narrower, higher average range), this project forced me to contend with how much my musical language uses registral contrasts between high and low to drive musical energy, character, and intrigue.

Without that tool in my tool kit, I had to find other ways to generate musical interest —a fun way for me to stretch!

The members of the premiering ensemble range from (talented!) high schoolers to professional musicians with masters degrees in music performance. All are members of the 2025 Fresno Summer Orchestra Academy whose oboists are trained and guided by Dr. Rong-Huey Liu, oboe professor for CSU Fullerton, Riverside City College, La Sierra University, University of Redlands and principal oboe for Long Beach Symphony, Fresno Philharmonic, Modesto Symphony Orchestra, Redlands Symphony, and Riverside Philharmonic.

I’m quite happy with the way the arrangement worked out and ensemble gave it an energetic first outing: from the chipper opening to the tender climax a few minutes in; from the stern central section through the joyful dance that brings the music to a close. Each member of the quintet had a least a moment to shine, led by Alessandra Ramos’ mellifluous oboe and Elian Kleparet’s noble english horn.

2025 FOOSA Oboe Ensemble

Oboes

• Alessandra Ramos

• Lela Buck

• Ryan Chen

English horns

• Elian Kleparet

• Kayla de Guzman

Congratulations to the performers—who in the following week also performed the Rite of Spring at the Walt Disney Concert Hall! (BONUS POINTS for those who can find my Rite of Spring reference in the 2nd English Horn part of the Rhapsody!)—and thank you to Dr. Rong-Huey Liu for trusting me with this collaboration; it seems like all involved got something meaningful from it: I’m told the piece was a fan favorite and I’m not going to argue with the cheering audible at the end of their performance!!

Skip to the recording of A Sunward Tilt

Music is born of co-creation and collaboration. Even when one person writes a piece of music and passes it off to performers without the two interacting with one another, there still must be co-creation to bring the music to life—performers interpreting a composer’s intentions and finding their own resonance within those perceived intentions. This can produce results that surprise (pleasantly!) the composer.

This is precisely what happened with my new reed quintet A Sunward Tilt, premiered by Fivemind Reeds in Los Angeles in late May.

Midway through May, I took a couple weeks off work, packed the car and made my meandering way from Portland, OR down to Los Angeles—to see family, to see the premiere, to see the sights. With a platform bed in the back of the car, all-wheel drive, and the help of a well-traveled friend, my girlfriend and I set out guided by a couple pieces of paper and a few pins on the GPS, prepared to fill in the blanks en-route as we made our 2,800-mile way there and back.

Though I hardly wrote a note of music, there was much music in the land.

Sunrise over the Alvord desert on second morning was worth the entire trip alone.

Some wrong notes were played, to be sure, but taken in stride:

Dusty, bemused, embattled, unshowered, awestruck we made our way south—eastern Oregon, western Nevada, eastern California—caught finally by the net of friends and family in the LA area, late on the eve of the premiere.

The day of the premiere, I was anxious—not my normal state and not one I manage well.

A couple days before, I’d heard a rehearsal run-through of the piece recorded in a boxy room that left me a little lukewarm, worried that I’d written a bit of lemon. I’d dashed off some (hopefully) helpful comments where I could find service on the drive to Death Valley, but had checked my expectations for how much of my piece Fivemind could address amidst a program of six other challenging works.

How would the piece come off? What would my family think? What would the audience think? What would the musicians think? What would I say about the music? Would there be ice cream afterwards?

The first half of the concert featured music written for Fivemind Reeds and the concert was something of a culmination of their partnership with living composers. Things were sounding good. Really good. This made me more excited and more nervous all at once, comparing the version of my piece in my head to what I was hearing.

Following intermission and a breathless rendition of Roger Zare’s Asphyxiation, it was time for me to introduce A Sunward Tilt:

And with the scene set, it was in Fivemind’s hands:

When the final fifth between bassoon and bass clarinet evaporated, you could fully appreciate how far the music had traveled. Fivemind had played it to the hilt, lively and robust where it needed to be, becoming warmer, gentler, and more wise as it went. The boxy sounds I’d heard blasted out of my gutless car speakers on the way to Death Valley were nowhere in sight; they’d navigated my nervousness and gone somewhere far far beyond.

The performance venue (a church) had a long reverb (1-2 seconds) allowing Fivemind to stretch the slower sections, with the benefit of letting the audience really bask in the beautiful decay of sonorities and harmonies. It was actually in this stretching that Fivemind found something in the music I really like which I hadn't heard when I wrote it; especially in the way they drew out the final minute (following the last climax) lent the music a beautiful, sad, and elegiac quality—beyond nostalgia or the simple goodbye to summer I thought I was writing and closer to a valedictory for life. Upon listening and re-listening (to the recording), I find myself moved in a way I hadn’t expected to be.

This reminder that I can make 100% of something, it can go out into the world, and then become something I didn’t anticipate but that I still find lovely encourages me to let others into my creative process more often; I hope it does the same for you.

Let go of thinking you know exactly how something is meant to be and trust the wisdom, soul, and playfulness of the others around you.

Increasingly I welcome the kind of exploration, discovery, and staking out of a clear musical perspective that signals full buy-in and ownership of a piece on the part of musicians, even if the final product doesn’t sound like I initially thought it would. In my first conception, A Sunward Tilt was quick and lively music with a couple slow contemplative interludes. Fivemind's spacious interpretation (specifically the way they draw out the slower sections) mounts a successful case that A Sunward Tilt is music with the soul of an adagio.

It was a special joy to share my music live with some of my folks. And there was indeed a frozen dairy treat (gelato!) down the street post-concert.

Getting to meet each member of Fivemind was a true pleasure. To a person, they are kind, authentic, approachable individuals (we talked about reeds, the interpersonal dynamics that keep a group together, the pain in the butt it can be to reserve a venue, etc.), and not afraid to share their humor and personality on and off stage, showcasing both the musical and interpersonal chemistry that has kept them together for five years despite living in different parts of the country.

Before long, it was time to head back home. The way north was more lush and a little less austere: a few more showers, soft beds, a more relaxed pace. The afterglow of the premiere and time with family followed me all the way back home, through the plains, around the redwoods, and by the coast.

What remains is growing trust in myself—that I might have something worth sharing with others, and that that potential is magnified when I trust partners will bring their gifts to the table and share likewise.

Skip to the recording of After Hours

I count myself as very fortunate to live so close to new ensembles excited to collaborate with composers of new music like myself.

nonesuch.reedquintet in particular (and in addition to helping to fill a gap in professional wind instrument-based chamber music in the pacific northwest) has been an extremely gracious champion of my music, recording my Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet last year and including it on the program of music they are taking on a six-week tour of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam starting next month.

And now nonesuch.rq has done it again—with a lively new recording of my piece After Hours.

Written in the spring of 2023, After Hours was the first piece of music I wrote that wasn’t (just) for saxophone, my native instrument. Writing something for my own instrument felt intuitive, but to make the leap to writing for instruments I didn’t/don’t play I (rightly) felt the need to take a long bath in woodwind scoring, orchestration, and idiomatic wind writing. Getting prepared to write After Hours was a large part of my self-directed training in music composition, forcing me to level up. The studying paid off and I’m proud of the result.

At the time of writing the piece, I still considered music composition a marginal interest in my life—hence the title After Hours, which is when I squeezed in writing the four movements that make up the work. The four movements are only vaguely musically related (a planing chord progression that gently begins the work and recurs in the third movement then becomes the main idea of the propulsive final movement; an unsettled passage in the second movement becomes an interlude in the rondo finale), but they have a deeper connection to my experience of the pacific northwest:

I. Wayfarer pays homage to PNW author Becky Chambers who penned a sci-fi space opera of the same name—one featuring humans, aliens, and interplanetary travel but is really about how beings with different identities, capabilities, and histories succeed and fail to transcend all of that to peacefully get along.

II. Late Spring is about the glimpses of summer we get during spring in the pacific northwest, often dashed by rain and gloom before we can fully enjoy them.

III. Talk Back has no explicit connection to my home but passes a moody groove around that later returns in an unsettling guise with a bucolic trio as an interlude.

IV. Boss Fight is an energetic close to After Hours, related to one of my favorite rainy-season pastimes growing up: playing video games.

The nonesuch.rq recording above is the original version of After Hours, which I later revised with some advice from the bassoonist of Calefax, the founders of the reed quintet as a musical medium.

You can now find the updated score and parts for After Hours for purchase at my website, along with the full program notes.

For readers in the Willamette River Valley, in the coming weeks nonesuch.reedquintet is looking to give a SE Asia Tour send-off concert—previewing much of the music they will be bringing to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—including my piece Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet. Stay tuned to their social media for coming details.

If you’re not able to come listen to some of the freshest music around served up by an inspired young ensemble but you still care about nonesuch’s mission to spark love for music among the next generation of musicians, consider kicking in a few bucks to support their touring and educational outreach.

As part of the festivities, Professor Salzman has assembled an alumni band made up of members from every single year he directed the Wind Ensemble—from 1987 to 2025.

Performing with the University of Washington Wind Ensemble during my undergrad (2010-2013) remains one of the highlights of my musical career. Professor Salzman at the helm of the Wind Ensemble was the first time I experienced the full power and potential of music making. Here’s my favorite example:

SCENE:

Beijing.

March 2013.

On stage at the National Performing Arts Center in Tiananmen Square, the final full day of the UW Wind Ensemble’s 10-day tour of Beijing.

On the program was Kevin Puts’ Millennium Canons, a few other pieces whose names are lost to me—a euphonium/tuba double concerto, something slow and pretty, a trumpet concerto—wrapping up with Symphony No. 4 by David Maslanka (you don’t forget that one).

In Maslanka’s 4th symphony is a part for pipe organ. Most performance spaces lack a pipe organ (they are large and expensive!), so we’d always had to use a synthesizer and speakers as a substitute. But for our final concert—the last time we would play the 4th symphony together—we would have the full pipe organ of the National Performing Arts Center. During the warm up, the organist touched a few keys on the manuals to check for balance with the ensemble. The air itself rang and the stage gently thrummed. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up. Professor Salzman gave voice to our excitement with an understated “Yes.”

Before the downbeat, a further digression is needed, back in time a bit more…

My maternal great grandmother passed away in the mid-2000s. When I got the news, I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel much of anything. I had no idea why I was numb and I felt bad about that numbness.

“Great” was mischievous and she was sweet.

When she wasn’t happily chatting or gossiping or cheating at a silly card game, she was often humming one tune or another under her breath. Sometimes “You Are My Sunshine”, sometimes something aimless, sometimes something that sounded old and deep and sweet—that one stuck with me, too, though I didn’t know it. The sweetness prevailed in hard times; even after my parents divorced, she kept a soft spot for my dad and would light up when he would take us to visit once in a while.

When she passed, my mom shared the news with me and my brother and dad in person and we all hugged and cried. Except I didn’t cry; I went and played the baseball game I was scheduled to play in that afternoon. It was true that me going and playing a game in her memory is what Great would have wanted (and maybe even cheating a bit—I did steal home plate that game), but it still felt strange and painful to not feel what my family felt.

Back in Beijing—back in 2013—we had made it through most of our program and most of the Maslanka Symphony No. 4.

The whole of Symphony 4—along with many of Maslanka’s works—is built around a few hymns and Bach chorales, appearing in whole or in fragments as the music unfolds, sometimes thickly sometimes thinly disguised. Though I hadn’t grown up in a church where hymns were sung, some in the piece seemed familiar—I hadn’t really thought about why that would be.

The last 5 minutes of the Fourth Symphony are a musical mountain. When you think the music can’t get more intense, Maslanka finds a way to make it so. It asks pretty much everything of the performers and the audience. Thematically, it’s a round robin of the tunes heard earlier in the symphony, belted out now in their most triumphant forms.

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe exhilaration. Maybe it was being in that vaunted space surrounded by lovely colleagues with whom I’d been through so much musically and personally. But this time (the 6th or 8th or 10th time performing it) one tune in particular, joyfully belted out by the trombones, now underpinned by organ, overwhelming and undeniable, broke through a wall—a dam, really—and made a connection back in time, back to that sweet, deep tune my great grandmother would hum that had stuck with me after all. The memory of her jauntily humming “Old Hundred” now combined with the resplendent version I was hearing; she was here, with me again. For the final two minutes of music and into the applause and ovation that followed it, I cried and cried and cried.

There is a video recording of this performance but it cuts off just a few minutes before this moment. I’m thankful for that, because I know it was one of those ugly cries.

Music made together, well, and to its full value can go back in time and heal and release and make okay. With an ensemble of 50 people, this is only possible with a leader that can cultivate trust, coax the best from each of us, and align us toward a common aim. That Tim Salzman has been able to perpetually create and maintain such an environment for decades—as evidenced by many people traveling across continents and oceans to sit under his baton a final time—is beyond remarkable, beyond special: participating in the creation and sustaining of that kind of space, even as an ensemble member, is some of the very best stuff of being alive. It’s why I and so many others have come back to the well. It’s why after a full day of work in an unrelated field, I somehow have energy when I get home to sit down and write music for a few hours—for the chance to create and share with others what I’ve experienced as a member of the UW Wind Ensemble.

No assemblage of words are up to the task of adequately conveying the gratitude I feel being a part of this extended family. I know many of my colleagues feel the same. Gratitude of this magnitude can only be expressed in the most elemental ways—touch, song, dance. Through its vibrations, music embodies all of these. This evening, gratitude will be made sound and be shared with everyone in earshot.

The Alumni band will be ending the concert—and Tim’s tenure—with Maslanka, this time with his 7th Symphony.

I’m thankful that, for me, the last page of the piece looks like this:

Rest. Because in the dying bars of the music, there will be waterworks.

On Saturday May 24th, Fivemind Reeds will premiere my new reed quintet A Sunward Tilt. The piece was selected as a winner of Fivemind Reeds’ 2024 Call for Scores Competition. The concert, which features 6 other new and recent works for reed quintet, will be live streamed here at 7:30 PST. On the eve of the premiere, I want to share how I am thinking about the piece now, an evolution I documented as I was putting the finishing touches on last fall.

The title A Sunward Tilt refers to the astrophysical phenomenon that produces our seasons—in this specific case summer, which happens when your hemisphere is more tilted toward the sun.

I am from (and this piece exists in the context of) the pacific northwest, which has a very different relationship to the sun than Southern California (where the piece is premiering). Up there, we have two main and lopsided seasons—the 6-9 months of grey gloom and rain that we are known for; and the 3 months of near perfect weather—sunny, dry, and mid 70s—that is our best kept secret. Both seasons lend themselves to very different ways of living—one indoors, cozy, introspective, focused around gatherings, coffee, books, and board games; the other all about spending time outside: cookouts, road trips, hiking, camping, stargazing, and the like. The contrast in the seasons’ sizes and characters creates a certain tension and attraction between them, a challenging and beautiful aspect of living in this part of the world.

After 6-9 months of grey gloom, spring begins serving up tantalizing glimpses of the possibility of joy in the outdoors again. This anticipation builds until finally the clouds part for good at the end of June and gives that uninterrupted run of near-perfect weather. The fulfillment of that anticipation is where A Sunward Tilt begins, whose opening idea I wrote on last year’s summer solstice.

Though summer has arrived, the relative scarcity of nice weather creates a real tension that is a fly in the ointment: the pressure to make sure you’re present in every moment and using the time to do the coolest or most fun or most brag-worthy or most productive thing you can. As summer stretches on into its second and third months, sometimes you just want a day to relax, to revisit that slower more reflective way of life that is pervasive during the other 6-9 months. Those reflective moments find their way through the cracks anyway: seated at the foot of a mountain, dwarfed; standing off to the side for a breather at an old friend’s wedding; watching a meteor shower streak across the Milky Way.

The music explores these two ways of being—and whether and how they can be balanced across the year, within the seasons, and ultimately, for yourself as you go about day to day.

Of course, as I was trying to figure out what the music I was writing was about and how it was put together, my analytical brain needed to make a little infographic of the piece, so here’s that!

Sheet music for A Sunward Tilt is for sale on my website for those interested. Tune into the premiere performance on Saturday at 7:30PM PST and hear some of the freshest new music for reed quintet performed by a fine ensemble, Fivemind Reeds.

I love an old-growth Pacific Northwest forest. If given the chance on a non-descript Tuesday I will drive hours from my home in Portland to stroll through a stand of ancient trees. In the last few years, I’ve visited Jedediah Smith Redwoods - a six-hour drive - six times.

This fascination is pretty recent. 2010s Shane would be scratching his head if he knew 2020s Shane was willing to drive hours just to walk among a specific patch of trees. “This is the west coast! There are trees everywhere! Down the street from your house, even! What’s special about those forests? They’ve all got trees, dirt, smaller plants, birds, bugs etc.”

One of the first albums of classical music I bought was Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s traversal of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10. The brooding music pumping through my iPod was the perfect soundtrack for that moment in my life—a moody high schooler (redundant) fresh from a dumb breakup riding a chartered school bus over a craggy mountain range to a winter band retreat as dusk fell to dark, the black shapes of mountains appearing, rising, and receding with the rage and terror of the music. I didn’t know anything about the piece (and couldn’t really hear the quiet parts over the din of the bus), but the emotional, physical, and sonic texture of that experience is still vivid to me today.

Hiking was an acquired taste that came with my membership as an early 20-something new to Portland in 2014 - there for grad school. My new school friends graciously introduced me to sweatily walking through nature and I came to enjoy earning vistas by making my legs burn. Every hike was a hustle through steep switchbacks on heavily treed hillsides to get above timberline for a view of the surrounding land. We were skipping the forest and the trees for sweeping views of mountains, rivers, and beaches.

I adopted the same goal-oriented approach to hiking and wouldn’t go on one if there wasn’t a grand view at the end. But on a trip to the Olympic Peninsula, a goal-oriented, tree-related hike conspired to snag (haha, tree joke; there’ll be more) my attention.

This tree was crazy big (19-feet across) and crazy old (born in 200 AD). I’d never seen anything like it - why hadn’t I ever seen such a tree?

For awhile I became obsessed with finding individual gargantuan trees, but the novelty of this (and the bruises I earned bushwhacking to reach them) quickly wore thin. I was still stumped by the relative rarity of the huge trees and environments I usually found them in.

When I would return to the Shostakovich Symphony No. 10, I was drawn to the highlights: the blistering climax in the development of the first movement, the vicious scherzo, the 8-minute gallop at the end.

(the gallop @ 54:47)

The icy, scantily scored atmospheric passages that made islands out of those highlights held little surface-level interest for me.

(some Shostakovich ice @ 40:58)

If I had had a vinyl record of the symphony, there would be sections so worn down the music would no longer be clearly audible and sections that would sound as crisp as the day the record was purchased.

Though the highlights were always exciting, the impact of listening to them in isolation quickly disappeared. I was perplexed that so much of the atmospheric magic of the first few hearings was gone.

Growing up I was vaguely aware that the last 200 years of Pacific Northwest history were tied up with the trees. I knew logging was a part of the culture and economy of my home, but somehow in a region blanketed in towns and neighborhoods with names like Packwood, Mill City, Mill Creek, Mill Lake, Mill A, Greenwood, Sellwood, and Northwood I hadn’t really appreciated its scale and significance. After a bit more research, I realized the scope of transformation that had been wrought on the landscape.

And I came to another realization: I hadn’t (knowingly) hiked through an old-growth forest.

A (relatively) undisturbed forest can be read like a great novel. In the odd way a few 900-year old trees seem to stand in a colonnade, in the black bark of one gnarled sentinel, in the kind of moss fallen to the forest floor, and in the sounds of birds in the canopy is the story of how an ecosystem has evolved across decades, centuries, and millennia to reach the present state: the dynamically balanced forest.

As I learned more about the human history of the pacific northwest, I also learned to read this forest palimpsest - the current version of the forest built atop the remains of a previous version, itself woven through even older iterations. Using clues to reconstruct recent and ancient histories of the forests as I was hiking through them became a kind of puzzle, as enjoyable to slot pieces into as was gaining a new vista at the end of a hike.

I even learned to see meaning in this kind of barren, desolate landscape - not particularly pleasant to hike through when exposed to sun and under 30lbs of gear:

What is shocking and oppressive at first glance has a deeper and essential ecological function for the landscape as a whole: a variety of habitats in a small area creates overall resiliency through diversity of capability and capacity; when a major disturbance strikes in one area, the adjacent area contains the literal and figurative seeds to help the disrupted zone recover; and the disrupted zone provides habitat for species that can’t live in a lush old forest.

Ecological, economic, and social considerations aside - a stroll through a regrown clearcut is like trying to make sense of a book that’s had most of its pages torn out - nonsensical, boring, frustrating. The symbols of “forest” are there - trees, green, the occasional animal. But “forest” as a dynamic and complex process with clear relationship to its surroundings is gone. Removed from its proper context, the meaning of even an individually impressive tree is significantly diminished.

Coming back to the Shostakovich after a few years away allowed me to hear the indispensability of those extended icy passages: the musical plains over which the terrifying climaxes loomed, giving those precipitous points the relief and prominence of a musical Denali or Everest. The relief between the plains and the peak produced the thrilling effect that is missing if you just drop the needle halfway up the musical slope.

Yes it is a major “duh” that cookies are sweeter with a sprinkle of salt on top and a hug warmer after time apart. But it’s still so simple to go straight for the sweets, not realizing that what makes them enjoyable is their relative novelty, their contrast. (don’t skimp on the hugs, though!)

For lack of writerly virtuosity, I’ll just drive this one home with a hammer: musical iciness, a burned-over forest, a hard stretch of life may actually be setting things up for a sweeter contrast, a renewed landscape, a sense of self-efficacy and gratitude. It is part of a process of being and becoming, not to be wished away or cut short; remember: this too shall pass. Life/music/the world is worthy because of its grittiness, variety, and finite nature; because of the desire, the not-having, the anticipation, and the fulfillment (or not). Without the rain and chill, being warm and dry stops being something you notice or appreciate.

All this isn’t a provocation to gratefulness or complacency; it is a celebration of the necessary contrast that makes life and music rich and its peaks, plains, and valleys meaningful.

A little over a decade ago, the Kansas City Symphony and the Nelson-Atkins Museum commissioned American composer Adam Schoenberg to write a piece of music in a similar vein as the Mussorgsky but this time inspired by the exhibits in the museum in Kansas City.

The product was Picture Studies, a 30-minute, 10-movement musical stroll past famous paintings, sculptures, and photographs housed at the Nelson-Atkins.

Though originally written for orchestra, it was soon arranged for ‘The President’s Own’ Marine Band, an ensemble with an ear for and an interest in sharing American and particularly American-sounding music. During the same few years, his American Symphony (inspired by Copland, the quintessential American composer) was also arranged for wind ensemble and a Symphony No. 2 (subtitled ‘Migration’ - as timely now as it was when premiered in 2017) was written specifically for band - which is how I became familiar with Schoenberg’s work.

I’ve long studied and admired (and borrowed from) his music, but this is the first I’ve had a chance to perform it. Being on the inside of the music, you start to notice more of the common elements of his compositional language - planing, a tendency toward major modes, long majestic melodic lines in lydian mode atop percolating rhythms, a dancing rhythmic vitality, extreme virtuosity across the entire ensemble, and a love of colorful percussion.

For the audience, Schoenberg’s unique musical language is mustered to illuminate an exciting and varied set of art pieces in vivid musical color - bringing those still images to cinematic life.

For those in the Portland, OR area, you can experience Schoenberg’s colorful and cinematic music this weekend; on Sunday at 3PM, the Portland Wind Symphony (of which I’m a member) will be traversing Picture Studies at the performance center at Parkrose High School.

As a bonus, the musical performance will be paired with simultaneous depictions of the art pieces being musically rendered.

Sadly, this concert will also be the last for Paul Nickolas as the Portland Wind Symphony’s Artistic Director.

Nickolas has been the Director of Bands at the Portland-area Sam Barlow High School for nearly three decades; in that time he has built a formidable music program that has touched thousands of lives. Nickolas brought that same constructive, generous, paying-it-forward energy to Portland Wind Symphony at a vulnerable time for the then-30 year-old institution - fresh from losing its previous Artistic Director and on the heels of the pandemic, an extremely uncertain time for large performing ensembles. Much more than stabilizing the group, Nickolas has reinterpreted and expanded Portland Wind Symphony’s mission (“Music for Life”) to align with his own venerable approach: finding ways to inspire young musicians and give back to the institutions (the public school system) which produced nearly everyone currently sitting in the group - often through regular side-by-side concerts with Portland-area high schools.

As a member of the ensemble, I’m going to miss his warmth and kindness - somewhat rare qualities coming from the podium, which is often occupied by individuals aloof and domineering. A favorite moment was the jocular, gentle way he once scolded the mischievous saxophone section in rehearsal when we were being particularly naughty (a not-infrequent occurrence): “you guys are making me miss my high schoolers!” He had respect for the group, for the incredible musicianship in it, felt honored to be a part of it, but wasn’t afraid to ask us to answer a higher call. And as a result, he will be widely missed by the ensemble and remembered in part for the collegial atmosphere he fostered on Monday nights in the rehearsal room.

Sunday is going to be drizzly and cool; come on down to Parkrose High School at 3PM to celebrate Paul Nickolas’ directorship and to immerse yourself in the aural museum of Picture Studies.

I’ll see you in the audience and after the concert!

Well, actually… *I* started whining about not being able to write a piece titled Quartet No. 2, say nothing about what it was about, and then expect to have it taken seriously by potential performers and listeners.

My patient and more thoughtful interlocutors conceded that, while Quartet No. 2 probably wouldn’t automatically be a hit, there is a whole spectrum between a piece with an ambiguous title like that and the caricature of programmatic music I was painting—my caricature: music accompanied by text that is a play-by-play description of what’s going on in the music and what it means, e.g. “when the cymbal crashes, that is lightening striking the top of the mountain”.

I eventually came around to their point of view: adding just a bit of additional context to music, rather than distracting from and cheapening it, can create an entire layer of meaning that would be otherwise inaccessible to the listener. ’s evergreen observations from his book Show Your Work makes this point forcefully in a single drawing:

By railing against programmatic music or music with a description, I was railing against a powerful tool for helping people connect with music and make meaning from it. And a powerful tool for providing people who could be interested in performing my music a compelling way in.

I also wasn’t being completely honest about my own writing process, which involves trying to get increasingly clear about what a musical piece I’m writing seems to be “about” and then iteratively editing it to get closer and closer, examining that north star occasionally to see if continuing in the same direction still makes sense.

One of my friends in the car was on the hunt for new repertoire to perform next season. A couple weeks before our trip, I sent them a first draft of a piece I had sketched specifically with them in mind. I was encouraged that there was a lot they liked in the music, but they had a concern about energetic pacing in the music, which at the time could be represented as something like this:

The draft had placed a towering, frenetic climax smackdab in the middle of its run time. The music that followed the climax never really recovered the spirit or energy of what came before, existing very much in the shadow of the central crisis.

My friend was worried about the placement of this climax and that so much music followed it, worried that it dragged on unnecessarily and made the music dramatically flabby (my words, not theirs). They pointed to a well-worn and effective template for music/story writing/film, which is to place the largest climax right around 2/3 of the way through the music - a shorthand version of the golden ratio 1:1.618 or ~5/8.

Encouraged that the music seemed compelling to my friend, I took their feedback and began revising the initial draft.

Following 17 revisions in two weeks, I still couldn’t find a way to make what I’d written adhere to those golden ratio proportions, unable to meaningfully change the proportions of the music or the placement of that central climax in a way that felt like it “worked”. (those 17 drafts were productive in many other ways - clarifying the music’s character and arc, giving a clear pacing to each section, and tightening up the orchestration). Through my editing, the lack of a musical high point at the characteristically climactic spot had become an even more prominent feature of the music than it was in the first draft!

What was going on?

I was trying to fit the music into a mold that wasn’t suited to what the music was “about”.

But I thought I wanted to write Absolute music, music that can stand on its own without listeners or performers needing to understand something beyond the sounds they were hearing to make sense of it?

Sometimes (usually) I don’t get to choose what my music is saying.

And the facts are that none of us approach music (listening or writing) without context: maybe we’ve heard of the singer or composer and are familiar with other things they’ve done; perhaps we have associations with the genre of music—bebop, country, classical—that create expectations for what we think we should be hearing.

My draft, written as a technical exercise in emulation, had outgrown the template and become music pointing to an extra-musical and universal experience: presence, loss, absence, and moving on. The big, shocked, musically numb hole right where the dramatic high point characteristically is is experienced like a bomb crater; clearly an important thing is supposed to be there and something happened to create that absence. That the cataclysm happens in the middle of the piece suggests the music is just as much about processing the disaster as it is about describing the events which precipitated it.

These are the kinds of programmatic thoughts that can help performers and listeners bring off and navigate a piece of music to sustain interest beyond where a purely musical experience might leave them.

It’s still on the composer to write something that “works”, that holds onto our attention from beginning to end, with or without that extra-musical elucidation. There’s so much program music—Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Strauss’ Alpine Sinfonie—that is marvelous to listen to without knowing a thing about the story behind the music—without knowing one recalls strolling through a gallery of your recently deceased friend’s artwork, another recounts a storyteller battling to save her own life with nothing but her stories, a third chronicles a somewhat ill-fated mountain climbing expedition. Knowing all of that can elevate the listener’s enjoyment of the experience and even, say, convince someone who wouldn’t otherwise go see their local orchestra to sit through the hour-long Alpine Sinfonie because they love the Alps and nature—subjects ravishingly represented in the Sinfonie.

A compelling dramatic arc is already clearly etched in my drafts. Creating a performer and audience expectation that the music traverses loss and absence—either in the title of the piece or in the program notes that introduce it—before they actually hear the music can help them contextualize the somewhat unusual structure of the music—a quiet, numb recitative flanked by two fierce climaxes.

I do tentatively have a title and program notes that provide this context. I’ll tease the music by leaving off with an excerpt of the program notes:

While this music recalls much of what matters and what is being lost—face-to-face connection with others, a non-utilitarian relationship to the natural world, seeing ourselves as part of that Something Larger which was here before us and will be here after us—the center of it is the hollow frenzy, overwhelm, horror, numbness, and dislocation that describes parts of modern existence today. As with the natural, physical, and digital worlds, the main idea of this music is packaged, repackaged, enhanced, sped up, piled upon, versions tossed aside with frightening frequency until cycles simply overlap and we find ourselves lost in the storm.

How do you feel about music that is “about” something vs music that makes no explicit reference to anything but itself?

Over the weekend, I traveled with the Portland Saxophone Ensemble to the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) Region 1 conference in Moscow, ID. We were there to perform my piece Breathe, Set, Play and an arrangement of Arturo Marquez’ Danzon No. 2, but we got as much from the other performances, masterclasses, and conversations as we did being up on stage.

A favorite part of the weekend was the masterclass given by legendary saxophone pedagogue Dr. Debra Richtmeyer who repeatedly exhorted the students and the audience (full of musicians) alike to form a clear idea of what the music you’re playing should express and then craft each element of your performance in service of that expression - from the phrasing of one measure to the dynamic terracing of climaxes across a piece of music. Some of the other ideas Dr. Richtmeyer shared have already made it into saxophone studio classes across the region:

As I’ve said, my favorite part of these conferences is the collegiality - the sense of mutual support and interest and desire to share with and learn from one another. It makes for a wonderful and encouraging environment that breeds more of itself. And at least for me it provides a positive and healthy motivation to work on my own musicianship.

In the spirit of sharing and of mutual support and appreciation, before the performance of Breathe, Set, Play, I got the chance to talk about how the music itself pays homage to one such member of our community:

The Portland Saxophone Ensemble then delivered a lively performance of the piece.

The entire NASA Region 1 conference at the University of Idaho was a treat. Students and professors from all corners of the region (from Missoula to Eugene and Boise to Seattle) consistently impressed with their performances, compositions, and kind thoughtfulness in conversation—heartening when ours feels like a region musically forgotten amidst the power houses in the midwest, south, and northeast.

At the end of the conference, I serendipitously ran into the students from the University of Washington, my alma mater. We traded conference impressions, snapped a photo to send to our teacher Dr. Michael Brockman (UW’s saxophone instructor), and talked excitedly about attending Tim Salzman’s (Director of Bands at UW) upcoming retirement concert in June.

A moment for Mark

Yet, at the center of the Portland Saxophone Ensemble and our performance I still acutely felt an absence: our bass saxophonist Mark Deffebach, a long-time pillar of the Portland jazz saxophone community, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly just weeks before our performance at NASA.

When I moved to Portland 11 years ago, Mark was one of the first musicians I got to know when I joined the Portland Wind Symphony.

Community groups can be full of people who don’t touch their instrument outside of the rehearsal room. But that wasn’t Mark; he was a student of music for life: during one of our last conversations, he enthusiastically shared a young jazz musician/composer’s YouTube page whose way of explaining harmony was opening up new pathways for his own approach to improvisation; he had recently purchased a bass saxophone and learned to master some of its peculiarities so he could bolster the groups he was a part of; his wife told me that in the week before his passing, he had been excitedly making preparations to travel with the Portland Saxophone Ensemble to perform at NASA and learn from the masterclasses and improvisation workshops.

My favorite thing about Mark was his kindness and the quality of full attention and enthusiasm he gave when he was speaking with you, shown not only in the way you could see his lively intellect move across his face while in conversation, but in the incisive and encouraging questions he would ask to draw you further out—something I find exceedingly rare in people today (myself included).

He was also a big supporter and champion of the people around him. He was a fan of this newsletter, frequently pulling me aside to talk about what I had written and going out of his way to find opportunities for me to get my music performed locally - including using his connections with The Portland Ballet to try to get dancers and choreographers to put on a performance of my Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet.

This is at best a 2-dimensional picture of who Mark was. Outside of music, he was an incredibly valued member of Portland’s community of physicians in ways I can’t speak to. And he has also raised and nurtured a family full of talented, high-performing, and values-driven people.

I will (continue to) miss Mark. He has given so many so much. It was more than enough, and so much more than many give. But I know he had more that he was doing and that he wanted to do.

We could each stand to be more like Mark: give the immensely valuable gift of your undivided attention whenever you can; be enthusiastic about something and strive to do it well; and find ways to celebrate and take care of the people around you.

I’ve found the small regional conferences to be really warm, supportive, and largely non-judgmental places to share what you’re up to - often in contrast to the way most musical social media feels - fast-paced, hot takes, humblebrags, highlights only, the “popular” kids in the lime light. You actually get to speak to the people behind the screens, to hear with your whole body the sounds they make, to see how music is much better in its full context than chopped into just the most dazzling bits.

I find I leave these kinds of spaces balanced, refueled for the long run, energized to play and write music, and excited to stay in touch with my new and old friends. Reminded that this is the way the world really is. So I’m off to get my fill, this year in Moscow, ID for a couple of days to celebrate being part of a small but special community - to share, support, and perhaps to be supported.

If you’re reading this and you’ll be there, come say hi! I want to know how you’re doing, musically and otherwise!

An offering for the saxophone world

And I’m excited to share what I’ve been up to with everyone, too: I’ll be performing Breathe, Set, Play with the Portland Saxophone Ensemble on the Friday night chamber music showcase; I’m especially excited to share all the new music I’ve written for our instrument and our community - quartets, saxophone ensembles, reed quintets.

To that end, below I’m sharing a summary of my saxophone-specific catalogue here, both for conference attendees and for other readers who might be on the lookout for new music for saxophone:

Saxophone Ensembles

Breathe, Set, Play (2024)
8’ - SS/AA/TT/BB/Bsx

The phrase Breathe, Set, Play is a mantra for beginning saxophonists to recall the proper sequence for starting a note—take in air, set the embouchure (mouth) around the mouthpiece, let the borrowed air flow. It is a series of steps one undergoes to achieve a desired state or outcome. In this piece, play is that sought state—a sense of exploration, discovery, and wonder where time disappears. Version w/o bass sax upon request.

Morning Comes Always (2024)
18’ - SS/AA/TT/BB/Bsx

Four movements (1. Gloaming, 2. Midnight, 3. (dreams), 4. Morning). Musical character roughly traces pathway from dark to light, exploring depression, negative self-talk, and the chance for renewal. Language is tonal with no extended techniques needed. The last movement can stand alone in performance and lasts 7’30" if duration is a consideration.

After the Bell (2022)
13’ - SS/AA/TT/BB

Five continuous movements (fast-slowish-fast-slow-finale) tracking the highlights of a childhood summer. Musical character ranges from fanfare-ish to retrospective to spirited. Language is tonal with no extended techniques needed. There is also a version of the 3rd movement that is 3'30" and stand-alone called Romp. Playing only the last three movements would make an effective performance, shortening runtime to 8’30” if duration is a consideration.

Romp (2024)
3’30” - SS/AA/TT/BB

Romp (noun): high-spirited, carefree, and boisterous play.
A stand-alone arrangement of the central movement of After the Bell, a rambunctious scherzo that makes a great concert opener or rousing closer.

Saxophone Quartets

Move With Me (2024)
13’ - SATB

Move With Me explores different relationships to movement. The first movement is a big ball of energy, a little chaotic, but Chaotic Good to be sure. The second movement is energy maybe too closely controlled and a little stilted as a result, but, through a different sort of movement, things eventually loosen and blossom, eventually getting somewhere important. And the third movement is a happy middle between joyful movement and structure—a grooving dance.

THS 2 SHLL PSS (under construction)
11’ - SATB

The title (pronounced “this too shall pass”) is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the in-vogue tendency to drop vowels in brand names—just one of the more recent (and silly) trends in a serious and long-term project to extract ever more time, money, and attention (and apparently vowels) from each one of us. We are convinced and compelled to crave and chase what we don’t need, companies happy to manufacture this compulsion and the product that temporarily satisfies it, all the while we lose and forget what makes living possible and worthwhile. Those missing vowels, the important things we’ve lost and lost sight of, what makes us feel rooted and deeply satisfied: face-to-face connection with others, connection to the natural world, seeing ourselves as part of that Something Larger here before us and here after us.

Apocryphal or not, “this too shall pass” is said to be a carefully calibrated answer to the question “What is something that is always true?” Often it is evoked when things are bad—but it cuts both ways, equally true when things are going well. This music recalls some of what matters, its trivialization, and what is being lost, but the center of it is the hollow frenzy, horror, numbness, and dislocation that describes parts of modern existence today. As with the world, the main idea of this music is packaged, repackaged, enhanced, sped up, and piled upon—versions tossed aside at a frightening pace until cycles simply overlap and we find ourselves lost in the storm.

Reed Quintets

A Sunward Tilt (2024)
7’30” - Ob./Cl./ASax/BCl./Bsn

The vigorous musical idea at the heart of the piece was sketched on the summer solstice. It contains all the energy and possibility latent in the 3 months of perfect weather that is summer in the pacific northwest. Amidst the irrepressible summer energy are moments of reflection - at the feet of a mountain, off to the side of an old friend’s wedding, watching a meteor shower streak across the Milky Way. These two moods contrast at first but find a way to coexist by piece’s end.

Suite from a Non-Existent Ballet (2023)
10’ - Ob./Cl./ASax/BCl./Bsn

Music from ballets of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev are consistently an inspiration to me. This suite is a kind pocket ballet, a selection of movements taken from an imaginary (or yet to be written…!) ballet score with major moments from an archetypal ballet story: I. Villian; II. Hero; III. Sidekick; IV. Conflict; V. Apotheosis. The reed quintet is a perfect canvas for this work as its members are the best at personifying distinct characters necessary to drive the drama of a ballet.

After Hours (2023)
11’ - Ob./Cl./SSax/BCl./Bsn

A collection of short characterful movements originally written in a couple of week’s worth of evenings squeezed between work and sleep. I. Wayfarer is an homage to the sci-fi book series of the same name by PNW author Becky Chambers, episodes of soaring heroism flanking a strange waltz; II. Late Spring evokes mixed feelings about the gloomy and soggy weather of my pacific northwest home; III. Talk Back is a moody groove passed around the quintet before traveling somewhere more pastoral; IV. Boss Fight is a short and high-octane finisher reminiscent of the final moments of playing a video game.