Finding Beauty in Small Places

This work is written for the consummate guitarist/composer/writer David Leisner, a dear friend with whom I’ve often worked, laughed and shared an inestimable array of topics concerning contemporary music and art. I am deeply thankful for his collaboration, patience and expertise in helping me, a non-guitarist, negotiate the guitar’s mysterious riches, colors and voicings.

I owe the title of this work to Russell Merritt. We’ve been closest of friends for fifty years. He knows me well and has an uncanny sense of decoding my most abstract musical thoughts and feelings and putting them into meaningful words. He carefully listened to me describe how this work was evolving, how in “trying to master an instrument the instrument masters you” (his observation), how I’d been tied to the idea of “breath” in shaping the musical gestures, and how, when the piece opens up and tries to move forward—trying to break free—it always returns inward. His thoughtful response was perfect: “It seems like you’re trying to find beauty in small places.” I did not set out to write a timely musical reaction to living in a world overburdened with the pandemic, political and climate upheaval, and living—as he also commented—within “a communality of great confinement”, but Russell’s words so aptly named what my inner workings were doing that they set me on a renewed path of discovering what this work really is about. We’ve lost so much during this period, and we need to try to find purpose—and beauty—again.

My friend Ralph Jackson’s unique, vivid canvases and photographs reflect an eye and vision that are at once personal and startling. I am inspired by his mix of varied hues and textures and meanings, and I’m honored that one of his photographs is the cover image of this work.

The Roger Shapiro Foundation for New Music commissioned and generously funded this project. Guitarist/composer William Anderson is its Artistic Director, and I am forever thankful for his musical support and friendship.

This work is dependent on memory and the movement of breath, on breathing the musical gestures and following the lead of the rhythms and the poetry inherent in the breath—a pattern of breathing in and breathing out established in the first seven measures.