Song of Life responds to a central question: how does awareness of the future change our relationship to the present? I began my writing process by thinking about Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, where a crumbling statue in the desert commands viewers to “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”, yet only sand surrounds it. Instead of reading this as a commentary on human history, I became curious about the perspective of the sand itself. Sand isn’t something we consider to be alive, but across the vastness of geologic time, sand can shift into stone. Stone moves across the earth’s surface, serving as river beds and ocean floors. From this perspective, sand flows like water, coming much closer to something we could recognize as life.

Drawing musical inspiration from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Johannes Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Song of Life paints a portrait of these geologic cycles in which past, present, and future are fused by the immensities of time. At a moment when it can feel that the world is ending, this music asks us to remember that we are a part of larger cycles, and that the end of the way we live does not have to be the end of the world. We are momentary participants in a larger Song of Life.