The Dense Wood is a very special piece of music to me personally. The music is based around the following poem I wrote durning my senior year of high school:

 

I will arise and go now, and go to the dense wood.

To my fortress of solitude among pillars of time.

Where crisp creek carves crevasse through crowded thicket.

Cacophony of birdsong and muted rainfall.

 

And I shall have some peace there,

for peace rests among the barren branches.

Wrinkled trees stand guard against unwanted thoughts.

And the crunch of displaced leaves breaks the serene silence.

Paths, not only for searching souls, but also for wandering minds.

 

I will arise and go now

for the wisdom of ages calls to me

And I will go now. I will go...

My dam of thought burst by the crisp autumn chill.

True inspiration I need not seek here,

for it will surely find me waiting with open arms.

 

     The poem, as well the music, reflects my thoughts about inspiration and the strange places and times in which it presents itself and also the immense serenity I find in a dense wood. Williams Butler Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" also served as inspiration for both my poem and this piece.

     The piece is actually a quazi-transcription as it was originally written for SATB choir. The poem above was set to music and that music forms the mass amount of material heard in this work. But, because of the access I had to a larger ensemble, I was able to add effects and extra-musical ideas into the work that only a band could pull off. (Such as the clarinet bird noises and the ethnic percussion colors.)

     The idea of the perfect 5th pervades most of the work. Originally implied by the crotales, the clarinet picks up the ascending fifth interval and creates a musical idea out of it. Throughout the piece, this original clarinet motif is taken through many different variations. It tends to pop up at strange times, just as inspiration does. The last chord is purely a triad without the third present. I wanted the end to be optimistic, thus I based the orchestratibon of the last chord on the brightest chord I know, the last note of the Chanconne from Holst's First Suite in E . Of course I had to transpose it to F and take out the third, (and maybe add a few instruments), but for the most part Holst's chord forms the end of my piece. The thick, sonorous harmonies are obviously meant to represent the thick foliage and denseness of the forest. Lines intermingle with one another and the texture becomes muddied with various combinations of instruments. But just as the music gets thick, the resolutions are, many times, to simple unisons. (The purity of nature and time.) Echos of phrases and musical ideas are present as are bird calls and other "creepy-crawly" creatures of the forest. It was my goal to immerse the listener in a sound world that feels both comforting and also tense. The interplay between these two emotions is what gives the work its character.

     This piece was commissioned by the Blue Valley West High School Symphonic Band for their performance at the 2009 Kansas Music Educators Convention in Wichita, KS. My thanks to Mark Nichols and Carolyn Knapp for their support.