The phenomenal Red Clay Saxophone Quartet commissioned Crossed Shadows to celebrate their 20th anniversary. I initially envisioned a piece for saxophone quartet plus tape, but the project unfolded in an unusual way. Among other things, I wound up adding an improvised drum track and changing the tape part significantly. It’s no exaggeration to say this piece wouldn’t exist without the essential collaboration of a number of people, starting with Red Clay.

The underlying structure of the music came from converting the frequencies and rhythms of human speech into musical material. This process resulted in complex, ever-changing rhythms and meters, which Red Clay spent a great deal of time helping me to adapt for human consumption. But never having written for saxophone quartet before, I was unprepared for how loud the ensemble would be. At the first rehearsal, I knew I had to re-work the tape part. My original intention was to use the electronics as a kind of shadowy veil over the eclectic, raucous, shapeshifting saxes. Alas, it was not to be. The unamplified quartet completely obliterated the tape. So I went back to the drawing board.

I decided to “beef up” the tape so that it could support and amplify the saxes’ strange stylistic odyssey. I used a Synclavier emulator to enhance the nostalgic elements of the music. Then I had the idea to ask the remarkable drummer Jake Richter to record an improvised drum set part for the tape, just to see what might happen. He recorded five different, perfect takes, effortlessly floating over the changing meters, outlining the fleeting grooves and adding his own. From three of Jake’s takes I constructed a hybrid final version. 

Finally, I worked with the brilliant composer, guitarist, and engineer / producer Andrew McKenna Lee on the recording posted here. Andrew found a way to bring my dream of interlocking layers of live saxophones, retro Synclavier and electronic percussion instruments, and Jake’s drumming to life with clarity, color, and energy.

I am immensely grateful to Red Clay, Jake, and Andrew for their tireless, dedicated, indispensable work on Crossed Shadows. Thanks, also, to Sound Pure Studios, where we recorded the saxes and drums.


Program Note

Two thoughts cross. Then two more, then many more—lines of thought—crosshatching shades of meaning. I'll depict the musical workings of this piece by borrowing from visual art and language, as if a drawing of straight lines crossing to form shadows. I made a list—for fun—of the things English provides with meaningful crossings: there are the stars, of course, that cross lovers; paths, purposes, and destinies can cross ineffably; eyes cross (each other) medically or comedically, while minds are crossed by thoughts; further afield, a proverb advises us to cross the stream where it’s shallowest; but rivers—both real and mythical—occasion more momentous crossings, e.g., the Rubicon, the Styx, the Lethe, and the Tiber, all of which change the crosser; similarly, we can cross the Great Divide on foot or in metaphor, but we might not be able to cross back; we cross our fingers in front of us for good luck (or sometimes, when lying, behind our backs); we might cross someone's palm with silverto know in advance what Lady Luck will do (or to ensure that she does it); we will cross swords, but only as a last resort; floors we cross more prosaically and usually without incident; signals, and the wiresthey travel on, tend to get crossed, and unintended consequences result; to remove the shadow of a doubt about our intentions, we cross T’s when dotting I's.

There are many shadows, and perhaps even doubts, crossing in this piece. While often chased and cast, shadows themselves don't normally cross, at least not in language. They appear here as an invention of the computer, an unexpected image generated by a simple program I wrote to transform a famous author's one-sentence story. The computer kept the story's syntax but swapped the original words for a vocabulary of my own. Think of it as a slightly more sophisticated version of Mad Libs. As a result, the meaning of the story changed completely. Repeating this process over 40 times created a longish poem with new themes and characters. Instances of one of them, the "crossed shadow," appeared twice in the computer's output, which I lightly edited:


The computer and I wrote this poem in 2018. It struck me as, well, haunting, but I didn't immediately know what to do with it, so I tucked it away in case a future use might arise. The passage of time has a way of working wonders on interpretive meaning. Rereading it five years later, I recognized the face of the shadow—one of them, anyway—and felt the impulse to make music with this text. The initial material of Crossed Shadows was not so much composed as extracted from the sound of my voice reading the poem. I derived pitches—and especially rhythms—from my recorded speech. You can catch hints of my voice speaking the text in the percussion section of the tape part, softly shadowing the saxophones and the electronic instruments.

Once I had a melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic framework from the poem recording, I set about shaping the music horizontally (that is, controlling the way the music moves through time) and vertically (how the various live and electronic parts intersect at every moment.) But this is a rather dispassionate description of what proved to be a tumultuous process. I was distracting myself from grief and sadness with the ebullience of bad taste. I wanted the piece to be, in part, about the associations my brain makes with the saxophone, and I wasn't interested in choosing "good" or "bad" associations. I included everything along an idiosyncratic spectrum of jazz, pop, and classical music as a potential reference. There are no quotations, though, so it wouldn't help to name names.

This indiscriminate attitude toward musical material also informed the choice of electronic instruments. As a child of the 1980s, the soundtrack of my life is full of saxes and synths. When I discovered a software version of the classic Synclavier synthesizer, the technological nostalgia I had been cultivating went into overdrive. Crossed Shadows is, oddly, dense with counterpoint; the speech patterns and their computational elaborations make the piece rhythmically hyperactive. I found that the Synclavier instruments added clarity and definition, not to mention cultural memory, to the layers of live and electronic sound.

These references to different eras and musical styles are never fully or genuinely adopted, however. Shadows can distort appearances. The speech fragments that audibly, if subtly, double many notes and rhythms are an enigmatic presence, conveying something between language and music. The grooves and repetitions imported from popular music and postmodernist aesthetics are in tension with the metrical complications of modernism. An apparently openhearted lyricism is continually thwarted by a relentless sense of forward momentum. It all accumulates into a pre-2000s technological optimism crossed with a 21st-century sadness of interruptions, fragments, and disintegrations.

The nearly year-long development of Crossed Shadows would have been impossible without the close and generous collaboration of the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, for whom I wrote it. Red Clay helped me to clarify the unwieldy, counterintuitive rhythms extracted from the spoken recording so that human musicians could play them, a painstaking process. I marvel at my luck: not only were these world-class musicians willing to invest time and energy into improving the notation and musicality of the piece, but they also spent months and months learning every inch of it and playing it more wonderfully than I ever could have hoped. I am grateful, also, to Jake Richter for contributing an extraordinary improvised drum set part to the tape.

I write music principally to surprise myself, to do things I didn't know I could do. Consequently, I don't know if this piece will seem frivolous, intense, disorienting, moving, or exciting to another listener. But not knowing this is what interests me: that any of these reactions is plausible makes the piece somehow more alive and mysterious. I am proudest of the shadows it casts but does not illuminate.