Promises

When I started writing Promises in September of 2014, I imagined the orchestra as an enormous machine relentlessly chugging away to accomplish some sort of task, or moving towards a goal of some kind. But, even as I got a little deeper into composing the piece, I still wasn’t sure what the goal was. Should the music grow bigger? Should it get smaller and smaller? Should it push so hard that it breaks apart? Eventually one of my teachers said to me: “This music seems like it’s promising something. You just have to decide whether or not it’s going to break its promise.” This made me think not only about the concept of a musical promise, but also about some of the promises that I’ve kept and those that I’ve broken in my life. The music started to represent something more personal and profound, and I composed the bulk of the piece with these thoughts in mind. In the end, I don’t know whether the piece keeps its promise, but I like to think it does.