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This work is a meditation on falling and rising—on the quiet weight of depression, the long road of perseverance, and the fragile courage required to accept healing. It began as a piece for tuba quartet. This piece was expanded into a larger context, allowing its emotional journey to be fully fleshed out. The opening music speaks as an inward plea from a shadowed place, where hope is thin but stubborn. The melody returns again and again, each time more urgent, until it becomes crowded with restless voices and unbearable thoughts. From this storm of sound, a new idea is born: a promise to endure. A fast and restless movement follows, driven by an unyielding pulse. It is the sound of running toward something just out of reach—of stumbling, rising, and pressing forward again. The music strains against forces that pull it backward, carving away at what once seemed impossible. At its end, a distant light appears, not as triumph, but as proof that the tunnel does not last forever. The final movement unfolds as a slow milonga, a gentle march of recovery. Here, healing is not sudden; it is shared. Community and compassion color the music, restoring warmth to a world once drained of it. Throughout the piece, notes that do not quite belong become the voice of the story itself. What begins as an uneasy ninth in a minor key—an outsider tone—gradually finds a home. In the final movement, that same note sings within a major harmony, still different, but now supported. The closing major ninth chord imagines a future where dissonance is no longer feared but welcomed as part of the whole. This music does not erase darkness. Instead, it listens to it, walks through it, and learns how to stand in the light without forgetting where it has been.
This work is a meditation on falling and rising—on the quiet weight of depression, the long road of perseverance, and the fragile courage required to accept healing. It began as a piece for tuba quartet. This piece was expanded into a larger context, allowing its emotional journey to be fully fleshed out. The opening music speaks as an inward plea from a shadowed place, where hope is thin but stubborn. The melody returns again and again, each time more urgent, until it becomes crowded with restless voices and unbearable thoughts. From this storm of sound, a new idea is born: a promise to endure. A fast and restless movement follows, driven by an unyielding pulse. It is the sound of running toward something just out of reach—of stumbling, rising, and pressing forward again. The music strains against forces that pull it backward, carving away at what once seemed impossible. At its end, a distant light appears, not as triumph, but as proof that the tunnel does not last forever. The final movement unfolds as a slow milonga, a gentle march of recovery. Here, healing is not sudden; it is shared. Community and compassion color the music, restoring warmth to a world once drained of it. Throughout the piece, notes that do not quite belong become the voice of the story itself. What begins as an uneasy ninth in a minor key—an outsider tone—gradually finds a home. In the final movement, that same note sings within a major harmony, still different, but now supported. The closing major ninth chord imagines a future where dissonance is no longer feared but welcomed as part of the whole. This music does not erase darkness. Instead, it listens to it, walks through it, and learns how to stand in the light without forgetting where it has been.
