Sighing Thaws the Frozen Birch
for Orchestra
2025
Read by the Louisville Orchestra on January 7, 2026.
This piece follows a solitary figure walking through a frozen, snow-covered landscape. Rather than depicting nature itself, the music mirrors the wanderer’s mind as it drifts between a cold, detached outward awareness and an inward reverie colored by tender, painful memory and emotion. Icy, frosted textures reflect the external world, while slow-burning waves of heat and ache emerge as the mind slips into memory and longing.
This work nods gently to Debussy’s "Des pas sur la neige," a piece that has haunted me for years, though its roots lie elsewhere. Listen closely and you may hear a theme from my earlier orchestral work "The Arborist, The Alchemist." The walker in this winter scene is the character I’ve called the Arborist, making this piece a sibling to the earlier work: another musical scene drawn from a long-term personal fiction project I have been developing over many years.