Facsimile

Program Notes

Facsimile, co-commissioned by New Music Detroit, CHAI Collaborative, and Citywater, explores memory—how memory can be big or small, personal or collective, quiet or weaponized—how we view memory as reliable when it is often rewritten by our own insecurities or the input of others—how it can be the small boat we send down the river when we’re gone.

The first and title movement, Facsimile, focuses on the mutability of memory, how it can betray us—a trait that can apply to both personal and historical memory. It brought to mind what happens to an image when it's copied afew times too often—a copy of a copy of a copy. The picture retains a bit of its original character, but repetition smudges defining detail, individuality.

The second movement (You Know Me by a Different Name) comes from a thought that my wife and I returned to often: how, looking back, younger versions of ourselves seem like entirely different people—with different goals, tastes, ideals. (Walt Whitman apparently held the same belief: when confronted with photographs of his youth later in his life, he described these earlier iterations of himself as “strangers.”) What do we owe these other versions of ourselves?

The third movement (The Transfiguration) is about becoming a memory. If memory is mutable—if we so often become new people—how do we persist after our time is up, if at all? While writing this piece, I served as the music director for a little Presbyterian church, and one week, the pastor dove into a passage from the book of Matthew: the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, joined by Moses and Elijah. The primary detail that grabbed my attention was not the main bit (Jesus revealing his divinity to the disciples,) but the fact that he asks the disciples not to speak of it until after the crucifixion (“Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.”) Even as a not particularly religious person, the image stuck with me, and it returned to me writing this final, summarizing movement.