Anxiety Cycles
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for winds (fl, ob, cl, hn), percussion, and string quartet (16:30)
I. It comes and goes (shepherd’s tone) II. Like a passing storm (meditation) III. There will be rest (chaconne) I was initially approached for this commission in the early spring of 2020, right before the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the United States. Commissioned by Soundmind and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the prompt was to address an aspect of mental health and I decided to write a work about anxiety. Little did I know that I would have a whole year, wracked with my own anxieties, to contemplate the nature of this work while music making in the U.S. was put on hold indefinitely. To me, anxiety feels like a trap, a cycle from which it feels impossible to escape. I knew that I wanted to incorporate this cyclical idea into the music, so I started thinking about cycles in music. Closed variation forms were the first to come to mind, and I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for chaconnes, specifically the chaconne from the Partita in D minor by J.S. Bach, and the final movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. After spending some time with the chords of my chaconne, I wondered how far the idea of repetition could be abstracted. I thought about the shepherd’s tone, and aural phenomenon that creates the illusion of perpetually falling (or rising). The last kind of cycle to come to mind was meditation; stasis in an unmoving state is a type of cycle in itself. These three cycles, the shepherd’s tone, meditation, and chaconne, give structure to each section of the work, and serve to induce different types of anxiety upon the listener. On a larger scale, this work is modeled after a storm. I personally feel like anxiety is like weathering a storm, and through the use of some of my favorite calming ASMR sound effects, the individual sections of the piece come together to mimic the process of a storm passing by. Watching the rain roll in, enduring harsh winds, a moment of calm in the eye of the storm, and finally arriving someplace warm once the storm inevitably passes.
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