Toledo Symphony Orchestra
2019 Bowling Green State University Reading/Recording Session
This recording is from a reading session. It is not a rehearsed performance.

Program Notes

Throughout my short life thus far, I’ve frequently experienced periods of extremely vivid dreams, ranging from overwhelmingly realistic lucid dreaming (in which a person is conscious that they are dreaming, and is able to control their actions and sometimes even the dream-scape itself) to horrific sleep paralysis (in which the dreamer is frozen in place and sometimes hallucinates figures around the room—I once awoke to a demonic version of ‘Dora the Explorer’ floating above me). My college roommate and lifelong friend, Amanda Leyman, would also often have intense dreams (probably because we were both often stressed), and we would sometimes joke that our sleeping consciousnesses were trying to find each other.

Portrait of a Dreamer was not written to imitate a dream, rather, I composed much of the music while dwelling on thoughts of deep, broad distances between people, and the precarious divide between perception of reality and imagination. This is illustrated in the wide melodic intervals, the unmitigated contrasts between ranges, colors, and characters, and the overarching dynamic span- quadruple pianos and fortes. The music does, however, operate by a sort of symphonic dream logic. Everything is distorted, like a brief glimpse or vague memory. And yet, there are always recognizable themes, motifs, and tropes, amassed in a synthesis of styles: I was largely inspired by the chaotic soundworlds of Krzysztof Penderecki, the vibrant orchestrations of John Adams, and the melodic and harmonic ingenuity of Schoenberg and Mahler (although this Portrait makes little use of any traditional harmony until its ultimate climax, launched by a single dominant seventh chord.)

In the spirit of visual art, Portrait of a Dreamer is built around a sort of orchestral framing. The music begins with a simple, stuttering viola theme, which returns in many different variations, always within a new context- the theme’s ‘frame.’ A version of this theme is almost always present in the score, recognizable by the presence of a large minor tenth, invoking a longing, an effortful reaching. The melody evolves based on its surroundings or in turn causes its framework to morph, like a lucid dreamer wandering listlessly in sleep. The orchestra billows around the endless melody, unleashing powerful, conflicting forces. Congregation in the high and low registers builds the top and bottom of the portrait’s frame, creating a feeling of great vastness. And finally, the frame’s horizontal structure—time—exists as a mirror, the final variations mimicking the first, but backwards: complete silence, the twinkling of high percussion, a solo string instrument, and the distant sound of a train horn. These impressions create imagery of very wide, vast, atmospheres, separated in the middle by a ceaseless, boiling turmoil that inevitably spills over in a shocking moment of catharsis.