Glimpse

for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano
Commissioned by Melissa Lander
Premiere: Quattri Quartet
April 15, 2020 - Catholic University - Washington, D.C.
Duration: 10'
Winner of the 2020 Tribeca New Music Young Composer Competition

Glimpse is a piece that I wrote as I found myself fascinated at the way and speed that our brains catalog information. The human brain is a complex machine that often works in ways that we’re unable to readily perceive – one of these subliminal processes being facial recognition. The brain constantly perceives and creates patterns among the faces that we encounter, even in passing, using information from all around us to infer how we might interact with one another. It’s through the repeating of similar stimuli that we’re able to quickly read emotions and situations in order to best ascertain how to act, or to unlock our own empathy towards each other. However, these same processes can yield implicit biases, shortchanging the very people we see.
Glimpse is structured and derived from a five-pitch set which is constantly run through various processes. As these processes repeat, the material begins to ‘learn’ from bar-to-bar and gesture-to-gesture, playing with and sometimes against the very rules that it finds itself entrapped within. Glimpse was commissioned by the amazing clarinetist Melissa Lander for the Quattri Quartet.