Program Notes

This piece came to me at a time of significant change and strife. It was two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, a point at which many of us could relate to feeling tired and hopeless. I was no stranger to this, and I was additionally in a transitional time of finishing school and moving across the country to an unfamiliar environment. It was a confusing time that even left me wondering what music meant to me anymore.

It seemed as though the entire world had lost color to me. The area of North Texas I was living in also did not help, as the landscape was more or less the same shade of brown in all directions for miles.

One day, I looked into this endless brown landscape and noticed that if you looked closely, there were tiny variations in this coloration. They were subtle but were there. I then challenged myself to look out into the landscape every day and find more and more subtle variations in the tones of the environment. The more I practiced, the more differences I could see. After many repetitions of this exercise, I could soon see drastic differences between these shades that seemed almost as stark as blue against yellow or red against green. Noticing the occasionally truly yellow or white flower became an even greater delight in this. This eventually brought back the color to the world that I had lost.

This piece is, hence, an ode to this practice and to rediscovering that color that brings joy to the world.