and all the lives we lived (2025): amplified soprano, flute, bass cl., 2 percussionists, prepared piano, violin, and cello.

When I first read Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse in 2019, I was haunted by her words for months afterwards. Through the juxtaposition of her signature stream-of-consciousness style and radical transitions, Woolf addresses (among other things) her own existential questions about the purpose (or futility) of making art. I knew that one day I would need to grapple with her text directly in a piece of music. What follows here is my attempt to negotiate my relationship to her work, my personal history as a musician raised outside of classical music who now works as a composer in many genres, and my relationship to narrative form.

"The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. 'And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.' She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things.”

This commission for Khemia Ensemble has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Mellon Foundation.