Consider the Cedar

Instrumentation: Flute Quartet

Duration: ca. 4:00

Program Note:

Consider the Cedar was commissioned by the Duende flute quartet for an outdoor performance at Congaree National Park during the Spring of 2021. The group requested that I construct a piece of “data-driven music” in which the elements of a data set (in this case the flood level of Cedar Creek in Congaree National Park) is used as a basis for creating musical material.

In crafting this work, I constructed a piece of “graphical software,” connecting boxes representing the data, various mathematical functions, and the resulting music notation in a program called OpenMusic. In this way, I was able to “co-compose” the piece with the help of the software I had designed, enabling me to listen to a large number of results before picking a particular one to embellish.

As the piece progresses, the short melodic fragments and gestures that the flutes play will gradually change in prominence. Some sections of the work will also suddenly change harmonic material. These processes reflect the changing height of the river from year to year, with each flute representing one of the year’s four seasons. While a piece as brief as Consider the Cedar cannot represent the intricacies of thirteen years in the life of the river, I hope that the piece might evoke something of the teeming life that Cedar Creek sustains, or perhaps the ever-quickening, destructive pace of life in the 21st century.

Premiere: April 3, 2021; Columbia, SC. Duende Flute Quartet.