PROGRAM NOTE:
The text for "Among the Redwoods" comes from a bit of prose from John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. The two sentences form a meditation on the passage of time, taking the redwoods as a momento mori. Steinbeck, standing among the redwood groves of southern Oregan and northern California, wrote that the big trees are "ambassadors from another time." The composition utilizes a repeating pulsing gesture -- a jaunty ticking clock -- and I like to think that the music exists in medias res, as if it is still going after it ends, and was there before it started...