These Things Persuade Us is a reflection upon my four year, undergraduate experience in Los Angeles. I have the utmost respect for the city of LA and have grown immensely as a composer and a person in this massively absurd, beautiful, complex, urban creation, but I have ultimately come to realize that LA is just a stop along the road and not a destination point for me. I’ll leave it to noted, Ozark historian and wonderfully eloquent, nature writer Ward Allison Dorrance to perfectly explain my feelings:

     “Why do cities exist except as libraries where we may go to consult, to digest, then to turn away to this [nature]? Why are they more than corridors where we may meet and say what we saw here? In this silence, by this water, by this mane of flame, where is the frittering waste, the futile, torturesome questioning, the tragic spending of our best? Here in this green chaos it is easier to lay down the arbitrary circle of our reality. The music of the river is, and the lushness of the woods; the mountains are. These things persuade us. They suffice.

     This peace we have won. This full, rare isolation we have taken for ourselves. Our muscles are sore, our backs are stiff, our knees are weak with the price of it. We had agreed not to talk of books, to remember print; yet tonight as of one accord we recall: “Be sure that there will always be solitude on earth for those who are worthy of it.”

        - Three Ozark Streams (p. 26-27)