Mar Profundo

2025 . . . sound sculpture . . . 10 minutes

This musical material goes all the way back to a solo trombone piece I started writing in 1969. Night Songs, which I premiered in Ann Arbor on bass trombone, exemplifies the dark atonal pitch language I was beginning to explore as a composition student of George Balch Wilson at Michigan.

Its first movement, “Elegy,” is somber in expression and amorphous in rhythm, a feature I use as an example of rhythm “beyond meter” in current writing and talks about Time. The line’s sonorous darkness now becomes a fertile theme for exploratory variations, suggesting the liquid life of mysterious creatures in ocean depths.

As the musical line ascends to a high-register bubbly surface level, it eventually sheds its atonal sharps and flats to become a lighter, diatonic pitch pattern. (Listen carefully at 2:27 and again at 3:40.)