Dust (2017)

for violin, alto saxophone, electric guitar, percussion, piano and live electronics

I didn’t work off a grid. Or prime the surface
if I could get off without it. I made
simple music
out of sticks and string. On side B of me,
experimental guitar, night repairs and suppers
such as this.

— C.D. Wright, “Our Dust” (1988)

This piece is written in honor of the memory of C.D. Wright, a great poet and artist who served on the faculty of Brown University from 1983 until her untimely death in 2016. C.D. was one of the first people I met when I came to Brown in 2004, and this piece is inspired both by her person and by her poetry. Her 1988 poem, “Our Dust,” is a particular inspiration, exhibiting many of the qualities of the extraordinary voice that defined her entire oeuvre. Shuttling between the formal and the vernacular, the experimental and the lyrical, the common and the prophetic, it exposes the complexity of a woman born in the Ozark mountains who would become one of the great experimental poets of our time, while presenting that contrapuntal vision as a beacon of hope and truth. In this piece, a well-known Arkansas folk song forms the source material, its spectral presence representing both a point of departure for the composition (“simple music out of sticks and string”) and a point of arrival for the audience. As a source of solace and sadness, the song’s poignant refrain admits the permanence of loss: “oh blue, oh blue, oh blue.”