Vivid was the word that ran incessantly through my mind a few summers ago, and it was a concept that I had long chased and never was able to grasp. Long had I been obsessed with the possibilities of writing for the wind ensemble, and that particular Summer of 2016, filled with the enigmatic works of Glass and Reich, inspired something totally new and completely out of my wheelhouse. It was in that summer that Snowy Summer Evening was born, but its concept was too ambitious for me, with my lack of experience and seeming inability to write longer-form work. The work began as a small idea, a simple melody, built on alternating between large leaps and small intervals, written in D-flat then copied, pasted, and inverted until I had a usable two-voice motif that could be heard throughout the work. Beyond, this, though, it fell flat, and although I continued the ideas through to a conclusion, I was not satisfied with the music, nor the instrumentation.

I could never leave it there; It paced throughout my brain incessantly, waiting for me to have the confidence and ability to revise it into something great, something that nobody had heard before, that was truly vivid. It was on a flight to Chicago in the surprisingly-mild December of 2021 that Geritt Davenport and I talked at short length about it and, after sharing my wants for the work, it occurred to me that I was ready to come back. I worked endlessly, revising, rewriting, and rebuilding this old work from the ground up, shaping it and molding it anew until it began resemble the work that I wanted to present all those years ago. After all of that work, it was ready, and I couldn't believe it.

Let this be a lesson, then; Let it say that our work is never finished, that it is okay to evolve and to change, and that it is okay to admit when something is beyond our grasp. Snowy is my testament to my past, my growth, and my journey, and I hope that it brings the same quiet contemplation and joy to you that it still does to me every time that I listen.

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