Still Life (2005)

Still Life has nothing to do with painting or the visual arts or even nicely set tables with bowls of fruit and flowers sitting on them. Well, maybe just a little. Sometimes I wish that I could make a still life in music, arranging sounds carefully together on a table, freezing them in time forever. But without changing those sounds over time, it’s hard to create structure in music. So this piece is really more of a slow-motion life than a still life, lingering around sounds as long as it can without losing sight of where they are going.

Still Life was commissioned by Beth Bryngelson & Christopher Laughlin, to whom I am grateful for their encouragement and support.