Ladders Cross the Blue Sky in a Wheel of Fire (2024)

for flute, Bb clarinet, viola, and electric guitar

Program Note:

This piece’s title is culled from an eponymous work by the 20th century Catalan visual artist Joan Miró. I fell in love with Miró’s style of painting during my elementary school art class. We were assigned various exercises where we had to attempt to emulate salient characteristics of certain painters, using their work as a model for how to craft our own pieces. With Miró, I had so much fun trying to recreate (admittedly inexpertly) what I saw as bizarre, alien, stick-figure like beings in these swirlingly otherworldly environments. Revisiting his work now, I am able to more deeply appreciate the sense of mystery, abstraction, and intense spirituality in these paintings—both ancient and modern-seeming all at once. And yet, I still find them deeply playful and childlike as well, full of joy and unfettered exuberance.

In my piece, I try to capture the experience of looking at this strikingly beautiful painting for the first time and gradually taking it all in in; first, as an incredibly rich and colorful composite, then honing in on specific shapes. Because of the abstract nature of the painting’s style, the viewer is invited to entrain and re-entrain to it visually. In the same way, the piece begins by presenting all of the musical material at once in a wild set of swirls and shimmers, and gradually zooms in on specific motives and interrogates them until, at the close, the composite of all these motives are viewed in a new light.