Infinity Sunset Score, Parts, License

PDF Score and Parts, Recording and Performance License. 
Duration 25 minutes
 
Program Notes:
 
Infinity Sunset began as a companion work to my arrangement of the Fauré Requiem for harmonium and string quintet, which I prepared out of necessity in the rainy fall of 2018 for my first community choir in Puerto Montt, Chile. I wanted to draw on my New York roots to present something strikingly novel, modern, and minimalist to a provincial Puerto Montt audience that would make a strong contrast with the Fauré, while also complementing it and, ultimately, drawing on the elder masterpiece as a source of inspiration.
 
Although not funereal, the title implies a kind of permanent rest, and like the Fauré, my piece both acknowledges and dwells in twilight and deep darkness while simultaneously adhering to a philosophy of hope. While Fauré imagines the soul in a restful paradise, Infinity Sunset imagines exuberant energy making peace with death. The closing measures of both works rely on the same ground bass, processing in a meditative loop between the submediant, dominant, and tonic under a tonic triad pedal in the upper voices. This progression made a strong impression on me when I first encountered it, performing the Fauré as a singer in the choir at Ithaca College as an undergraduate in 2006. Its combination of repetition and variation, major and minor, and the way it implies a restful close without the strong contrast of a dominant harmony so central to the common-practice harmony that I teach in the classroom every day, has remained a central part of my harmonic thinking ever since.
 
I wrote Infinity Sunset to be played with two friends. At its premiere, in the magnificent wooden Jesuit church in downtown Puerto Montt, we played the organ and piano parts on small electric keyboards without amplification. During the following season we also performed the second movement on several occasions using a Clavinova and a portable preacher's harmonium. Although these performances were well received, I was never satisfied with either the effect of the small instruments or the truncation of the work. In early 2019 we attempted to make a recording using the organ in the Lutheran church of Puerto Montt, but we were unable to achieve satisfactory results.
 
In my first semester as a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo in 2020, together with two colleagues, I performed the second and third movements on a composition recital of chamber music at St. John's-Grace Church. Although dreadfully under-rehearsed, this performance was in many ways an improvement, and a rough recording of the third movement carried the piece through the next several years as I looked for opportunities to bring it before new audiences under better conditions.
 
That opportunity came unexpectedly when Aurélien Sauer took an interest in this corner of my work while curating the 2025 Classic Metz'ival, pairing Infinity Sunset with my arrangement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony for string quartet, piano, and organ. Although rehearsals were brief, and there were immense challenges posed by that week's sweltering heat and the placement of the instruments within the Romanesque church, with Loreto Aramendi at the organ console the work finally came to life. Seven years after it was written, Infinity Sunset received the fully realized performance I had imagined while composing it.
 
Since the recording from the Metz'ival performance, though good, could not be commercially released for legal reasons, the arrival of both Aurélien and Loreto at Western Colorado University this past February provided an unexpected second opportunity. With my colleague Ben Justis willing to conduct and Conner Shaw generously offering to engineer the recording session, we finally had the right circumstances to preserve the work as I had long hoped. We also performed it live in two recitals at Western and another in Montrose. The recording from that February session is what you hear here, edited and mixed by me with extensive and generous advice from Conner Shaw.
 
The first movement of Infinity Sunset always pulls me back into the tiny bedroom I used as a studio at the apartment I lived in for years in Puerto Montt, looking out into the gray sky, trees bending in violent winds with constant rain as I worked. The second movement I wrote on a bus home from Valdivia, rain gliding in repetitive streaks across the window as the landscape outside transformed from wetlands, to pasture land, to the magnificent view of Volcán Osorno over Lago Llanquihue, and finally, almost without warning, into the hard concrete and mechanical motions of urban Puerto Montt. In the third, the incredible energy and unbridled optimism I felt during those years takes flight. While you listen, I hope your imagination and soul does, too.