Observer

Details:
for Large Ensemble: 1.1.1.0. — 0.0.0.0. — perc. (2) — strings
10 minutes

Written for the 2020 National Orchestral Institute + Festival. Premiered at the University of Maryland Clarice Performing Arts Center, June 2021. Conducted by Yu Wang and Nathan Bieber.

About the work:
As an avid film lover I find myself constantly in awe of the richness and impact that moving images can have. American director Kelly Reichardt’s filmography is an oeuvre that consistently opens up new doors to me on each watch. Her ability to communicate emotional depth through subtleties is something I found myself drawn toward as I began writing Observer. The music of Observer is often static or slow-moving—Reichardt’s style is often described as “slow cinema”—but the texture is constantly shifting in small ways. The strings swell in and out of this wash of sound, always playing each pitch just slightly different than before. Whether it be playing the same pitch on a different string or moving the bow to different parts of the instrument, the sounds are continuously changing even though the notes stay the same. These subtle changes in producing sound carry with them a certain weight. Instead of the rise and fall of a dramatic melody, the shifting textures and sounds stack up to create an atmosphere that the listener can get lost in. Throughout the piece, certain players in the group are instructed to continue on independently from the group, giving the performers an autonomy to create their own musical narrative. This independence combined with the steady movement from the rest of the performers creates its own world, as if you were looking out your own window watching people pass by on their day-to-day routine. When I watch Reichardt’s films, I often get the sensation that I’m seeing something I’m not supposed to see, not that the narrative is ever that dramatic, but the moments we see on the screen feel so intimate and personal. She has this uncanny ability to direct a scene as if she just happened to set a camera in an arbitrary location and we are merely observing people as they live their lives on the other side of the screen. Observer seeks to exemplify this magnification of the mundane, and to show just how beautiful the subtleties of life can be.