Beyond Color There Is Light - for pierrot sextet (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano). Commissioned and premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in August 2025.
Beyond Color There Is Light draws on my experience at the massive Rothko Retrospective at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris in January 2024. It was truly surreal to see 115 Rothkos in a single space and there was a beautiful, enigmatic, and luminous aura among the entire space. Seeing so many of these paintings, and seeing them so closely, one starts to realize how one-sided it is to characterize these paintings as still or suspended; these are incredibly active paintings filled with magnitude of tiny details in color, brushstrokes, and shapes that add so much to the vibrancy of the work. These micro-activities also helped create the sense of inner illumination that Rothko sought to create from within the paintings themselves. In Beyond Color There is Light, I try to capture this duality of stillness and create a sense of luminosity through the orchestrational and harmonic worlds. Through passages of driving melodic lines and rich harmonic webs, a passage of dreamy, floating, and rustling chords with a lyrical cello solo, and an animated, mixed-meter passage, the experience of this piece is as if we notice all of the tiny details flash before our eyes, but we still maintain this shimmering and suspended world in our presence. Beyond Color There Is Light was written with appreciation and admiration for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Tim Weiss.