light spaces in strange places (2025)
premiered:
14 February 2025: at the 2024-25 CCT (Composition & Computer Technologies) Graduate Composers Concert, Charlottesville VA, USA
recorded:
15 February 2025, Old Cabell Hall, UVA
composed for LINÜ: Gulli Björnsson and Jiji
notes:
light spaces in strange places explores themes of interconnection—between instruments, between performers, and between the acoustic and the electronic. Originally written for two guitars, the piece processes their signals through a custom-built software engine designed for my bowed augmented string instrument, the EV.
The engine tracks pitch and amplitude, blending the natural sound of each instrument with synthesized material that follows its movement. At certain moments, a specific note will trigger a freeze, capturing a fragment of sound and holding it in suspension until it’s released or replaced. These moments create shifting layers, sustained textures, and timbres that sit somewhere between the familiar and the altered.
The title comes from a walk with my mother along the lake near my parents’ new home—an old Victorian house on a decommissioned air force base. The place felt both beautiful and strange: calm water and wide grassy fields edged with abandoned buildings and silent aircraft. That afternoon, the low winter sun cut through the clouds to form a single bright spot of light between two mountain peaks on the horizon. My mother remarked that, at that time of year, it wasn’t unusual to find “light spaces in strange places.” The phrase lingered, becoming a metaphor for the work’s search for moments of beauty in unexpected contexts—where the past hums beneath the present, and where sound, like light, can illuminate unlikely spaces.
