Out of the Shadows

For Band
Duration: 5:30 minutes

This work is largely inspired by an earlier work for antiphonal brass and percussion – Shadows. Shadows was a winner of the 2011 Dallas Wind Symphony Fanfare Composition Contest and was premiered at a Dallas Wind Symphony concert by the University of Oklahoma Wind Symphony.

While completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Memphis, I had the fortune of studying with Kamran Ince, a student of Joseph Schwantner. My senior year there, we hosted Dr. Schwantner as composer-in-residence for our new music festival. I was introduced his music, and it had a very profound effect on me and the way that I write. In his work for orchestral winds and the mountains rising nowhere… (inspired in part by the poetry of Carol Adler), there is a moment that appears like the sight of mountain tops suddenly clear and in view, rising from nowhere, with a stepwise rising theme in the horns. The idea of it was so very clear to me in the moment and inspired this short burst of energy.