Beyond the Translucent Veil (2003) 16' for four contrabasses and piano

This piece was premiered as part of the All Rivers at Once project on April 18, 2004 at the chapel of Concordia College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It was also performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival, on July 25, 2004.

This piece received honorable mention in the 2004 Salvatore Martirano awards, and will be performed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in September 2005.

To me, there is something very spiritually true about the harmonic series. It is a set of relationships fundamental to the universe, the set of notes we hear simultaneously from any simple vibrating body and the only way that a collection of pitches can combine so that we hear them together as one note. We can think of this as a manifestation of non-duality, that individual notes from the series seem like different entities, but are actually part of a larger whole. The harmonic series (and interactions between a number of them) is a very important element in my piece Beyond the Translucent Veil, as are subtle shifts in tuning, in vibrational energy. The work is about mysticism, about both meditation and trance, about Gnosis, about a kind of transfiguration. The title refers to the veil that separates our perceptions of from what actually is, and the moment of mystical understanding in which we move, if even ever so briefly, beyond the veil, and experience reality in what thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart would call its Istigkeit, its full "Is-ness."