Composer

Juniper and Birch

I. Arriving
II. Gathering
III. In an Old Photo, a Summer Field of Tall, Golden Grasses
IV. My Granduncle Stands on a Soviet Tank Graffitied with Flowers
V. Small Joys Out Loud
VI. Departing

string quartet

duration: 24 Minutes

Commissioned for the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis University by the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize 2022, generously funded by a gift from anonymous donors. Premiered on October 19, 2024.

Program note

Rõõm ja mure kaksikvennad 
Kaksiklapsed looduskojas, 
Kõnnivad kässi käessa, 
Rändavad sammu sammussa.

“Joy and sorrow are twin brothers, children in the house of nature, where they walk, they’re hand in hand, where they go, they walk in step.” – from “Kalevipoeg,” the Estonian national epic, translated by Merike Lepasaar Beecher

“Juniper and Birch” draws its inspiration from a series of trips I made as a child to my mother’s homeland of Estonia, spending the bulk of my time on my granduncle and aunt Uno and Helju’s tiny farm in southern Estonia. In evoking this place and time, I found myself writing music that sat on the edge of joy and sorrow, innocence and age. As I get older, every year I have an increased appreciation for the ways we are asked to hold emotions simultaneously, and a richer understanding of the way joy and sorrow are intertwined throughout our lives. These childhood trips to Estonia were multi-layered: a sense of magic, the unfamiliar, and home combining for me along with a context and history I didn’t fully understand: the lives of Uno and Helju, Gulag survivors who lived to see a free Estonia in the early nineties. In this piece I wanted to write music that tried to capture this moment of family reassembly, and the individual worlds of experience and feeling that each of us brought with us—music containing a constant counterpoint of emotions: sorrow lurking behind playfulness, thoughtful wistfulness walking hand-in-hand with fierce stubbornness, and scattered outbursts of unabashed, deeply felt joy, made more meaningful by the sea of emotions around them.

At the center of the work are two movements inspired by specific photographs from these trips: movement three by a photo of my mother embracing Uno (in many ways her surrogate father) in an Estonian field, with golden grasses radiating light, and movement four by a photo of Uno standing on a Soviet tank, abandoned by the side of a road and covered with graffiti flowers. The second and fifth movements are stitched together out of a jumbled collection of memories from this time, with each movement arriving at a small moment of joy or triumph that seems more significant after the passage of time. And the outer two movements are music for our arrivals and departures, with Uno and Helju standing at their fence gate alongside a gravel road. I hope for listeners that this piece unfolds a little like a dream, full of buried references, waves of color and emotion, and sharp juxtapositions, leaving behind a warmly elusive feeling, rich with memory and shimmery light. Many thanks to the Lydian String Quartet for commissioning “Juniper and Birch” as well as MacDowell and the Bogliasco Foundation for giving me the space and time to work on this quartet.