Everybody Leaves If They Get The Chance

Program Notes

For years, I lived in Marquette, Michigan. (Anyone who’s talked to me for five minutes could tell you this—I never stop talking about it.) The Upper Peninsula’s remoteness and nature really clicked with me, and because of it, I leaned hard into landscape music, all lakes and waterfalls and old growth forests.

And while that influence means a lot to me, it’s not what I grew up with. I’m from a tiny Midwestern town where “downtown” was one stoplight and the “landscape” was a Sunoco station next to a storage unit and a junkyard with an old swayback horse living in it. It took a long time for me to experience sprawling cities or big, remote nature. I only knew that kind of late-capitalism in-between-ness, the empty places that it creates. It made me ask: what does landscape music sound like when it’s about that kind of landscape? That question became this piece, commissioned by the inimitable NOW Ensemble.

High Summer is childhood in a flyover town—a mix of simple joy and a gnawing hunger, glimpses of what you might be missing. Elegy for Sugar is two things: that same hunger now very present, kicking at the walls, eventually escaping—and at the same time recognizing the folks who never get out, by choice or by circumstance. (“Sugar” was the aforementioned junkyard horse.) Innisfree balances things in retrospect: it’s loving somewhere from a distance but knowing why you left—it’s coming to understand that that early joy you felt was real and can be cherished, even if joy looks different now.

Because of NOW’s unique build, especially with the stellar Mark Dancigers on electric guitar, this piece also picks up rhythmic or textural influences from groups that express the malaise of youth in remote places.