Full Score
Program Notes
Monument of Shadows" was composed in summer 2018 after hearing symphonic works by Galina Ustvolskaya, a Russian composer sometimes called "the lady with the hammer" because of her intense, persistently dissonant music. This work imagines the resonant strikes of those hammers echoing outward. As the piece proceeds, the shadows cast by monumental stacked sonorities become more rich, complex, and intense; reclaiming their agency as more than echoes, but a force unto themselves. In this way, the work represents the cycles of a political or social movement that gains traction and topples its oppressors, but in doing so risks casting shadows of its own in an endless cycle of destruction and violence.