I didn't get to talk about this last night, but The Death of the Moth performance was phenomenal I thought. Really. I was thinking as I listened to it that it was so clearly, to me, you -- i.e., that you have a distinct compositional voice that for me is a through-line to your music for as long as I've known you. I thought if I walked into Finney Chapel and heard that piece playing, I would instantly know it was yours. Then I was thinking: okay, so what characterizes that voice, why would I know? And the answer that came first was -- in painting they talk about an artist's 'color sense', that artist's feeling for color (or lack thereof). There's something innate there (my teacher in high school loved my color sense, and it wasn't anything anyone had ever taught me), maybe just as a baby's personality is already imprinted. You have a fine 'texture sense' that's been there from the start -- what distinguishes it is its utter clarity, alongside an eclecticism and a level of sensitivity and detail that justifies that eclecticism. Only of course now everything has been honed and fine-tuned; it's such a treat for me to hear your work now, after twenty-odd years of creative output. Methinks you've always been talented, but now you have accrued expertise. No small thing, expertise.

Dirge for Déjà Vu stirs something very deep in me. When I read your program notes, I am struck by one line in particular: "But what is the feeling when the past is not as present as it should be?" So much of my personal work has been about just that: trying to get a handle on a past that is not as present as it should be. Your music touches the anguish and longing of wordless amnesia. The "wordless" part is important, for the amnesia isn't total. I have deeply visceral and emotional memories, and slowly, these are becoming more present. Sometimes they are harrowing to face, and I cannot. But I sense that when I can face them and begin to hang words on them, name them for what they are, they will cease to have so much power. So I seek to name that which I know at some wordless level.

I am also haunted by the four pairs of walloping sounds at the end of Dirge for Déjà Vu, the ones I think you said were "like a sheet being shaken out". What else was it that you said about those sounds? Did you say something about dust particles in the air and how they dance silently, and capture the light? Because I can see those dust particles... I think partly what this piece evokes in me is an image and a strong visceral sense of this "other world" - a world that is real, just on the other side of a thin veil, a world of which most of us only have occasional glimpses. Your music captures the light and beauty of this world, but also evokes the deeper awesome, fearful power, which must be respected. And those walloping sounds at the end - that send the dust particles in the air dancing silently on the light - those are hopeful. They are gateways.