Lavender

Lavender is a thirteen-minute work for saxophone quartet, voice-over, and original macro cinematography of insects, written for ~Nois and premiered at the Andy Warhol Museum. Just intonation tuning and a written narration sit alongside footage shot in the Pittsburgh area at a scale where the line between organism and ornament begins to dissolve. The piece is concerned with place and memory, and with humanity’s relationship to the natural world — the creatures who live beneath us, and the tenderness we once felt toward them.

Program Note

Lavender is a meditation on our relationship with the creatures who live below us — namely, insects. The piece begins in a garden, in childlike recognition; as the strictures of daily life accrete, that relationship becomes secondary, even subservient. Lavender searches for a way to hold both what we were and what we have become — as a wish to remember the tenderness we once felt, and to reconcile the fear of the unknown.