As I write this, a plane soars overhead, melting snow drips loudly outside my window, people shout from the street below and a world continues. Such multiple layers of activity are nothing special; they are a simple fact of existence. I think that some of my earliest reflections on this phenomenon come from afternoons watching the oceanfront. As I watched, birds soared overhead, while below the sea remained calm, and the rocks immobile. In a more chaotic context such as a cityscape, the actors become more numerous and noisy.

For many years now, I have been working to try and reflect these active environments in my compositions, for in music we are given the great gift of being able to convey such multivalence simultaneously. In doing so, perhaps in some way I am able to transform my experiences or else to, on some level, come closer to an understanding of humanity, especially given this time when humanity is at a premium.

At its most basic level, my trio is in sixteen sections each guided by a six-note generative chord, themselves, taken in succession, forming a convincing progression at least to my ear. The sections are grouped in a repeating series of paces: slow, accelerating, fast, decelerating and made to overlap each other as follows:

One could almost think of this structure as reminiscent of the waves that fascinated me. As one wave rises another sinks back into the sea.