Picture Whimsies (for a Distracted Mind)

ensemble flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion
written winter 2018 - spring 2019
duration 35 minutes

premiered December 1 2019, Enoch Pratt Free Library by Roger Wu Fu (cond.), Adam Eydelson (fl.), Yu Wang (cl.), Claire Hebeisen (vln.), Rahel Lulseged (vc.), Sherry Du (pno.), Colin Crandal (perc.)

Presented as part of the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Annual Artist Series, 2019-2020

There have been countless times when I have walked through a gallery, admiring the craftsmanship of who I thought was a single artist, only to discover half an hour later that I had unknowingly passed through several different exhibits. My inclination to ignore captions notwithstanding, such experiences have illustrated to me my tendency to draw on similarities from work to work. Every so often, paintings that might have nothing to do with one another might seem, to my eyes, quite related, sharing brushstrokes or color choices or subject matter or moods.

Picture Whimsies (for a Distracted Mind) was written in collaboration with Art10Baltimore, a collective of nine Baltimore-based painters. Each of them, without consulting the others, produced an original painting for me to write a movement to. People, perhaps by nature, enjoy extracting narratives where none might have been intended, and this suite invites listeners into the emotional arc my mind constructed when I first had the chance to see all of the paintings together. Though the movements seek to be fairly self-contained, I sought to imitate my own tendency to draw connections across (possibly unrelated) paintings by peppering motivic, timbral, or formal similarities between them.