The Howling Wilderness (2018)

For Orchestra,

3*3*3*3* - 4331 - Timp. + 3 - Pno - Hrp - Strings

Duration: 15 min.

Premiered by The Chelsea Symphony conducted by Matthew Aubin at The American Museum of Natural History on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2018.

Composer’s Note:

The Howling Wilderness reflects on how our perception of nature has changed over time. The title appears in many accounts of early American settlers who must have struggled to describe being surrounded on all sides by a wild, forbidding, and unknown wilderness. This is a far cry from my experience living in New York City, one of the most developed places on Earth, where one is surrounded instead by concrete and skyscrapers. Nature here is the exception rather than the rule, something that must be sought out, preserved, and protected.

My goal while writing the piece was to imagine New York City before its development. I wanted to get inside the heads of those first Dutch settlers and the Native Americans who came before them, who instead of seeing the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building saw a bountiful but strange land, something wild and dangerous, but also majestic and beautiful. The Howling Wilderness tries to capture these disparate elements and to recreate a primal and untouched world we are likely never to see again.