Finding Home - for chamber wind ensemble
Year: 2021
Grade: 5
Duration: ca. 8:30
Purchase: Murphy Music Press
Recording: Texas Christian University Musicians | Harrison J. Collins, Conductor
At the young age of eighteen, I went to college several states away from my hometown. I left the people and the places that I loved dearly—everything I knew, essentially—to go to a new and completely unfamiliar place. I hoped that I would find a new home in the place I was headed, and I did; I became familiar with new places and new people, and grew accustomed to my life at college. But, over time, it grew more and more difficult to be away from my family, and although I visited occasionally, I found myself missing it deeply every time I left again, so much so that it practically ate away at me. Eventually, at the age of twenty-one, I made the decision to transfer to a school close to home so that I could be close to my family, trading my second home and the people I had come to love there for the chance to reconnect with my first home.
During these years, I became increasingly conscious of the way I thought about and defined "home". Not only was I struggling with finding my literal home; I was also grappling with finding what home means to me. I've come to believe that home is not defined only by places or people, but by the combination of the two over time. Perhaps that's why three years in a new place with new people became a home, but in a different way than the places and people with which I had spent eighteen years.
Finding Home attempts to capture the emotional journey I went on over three years of leaving homes for new homes, expressing the joy, wonder, and melancholy I felt along the way. The work utilizes an original melody introduced in solo bassoon and a hymn tune called "Beach Spring", but that I know as "Till We Meet Again". This melody, a tender and impermanent goodbye, summarizes the bittersweetness of parting ways throughout the work. The work features quite a few elements of rock music, as this is the music I grew up listening to. Finding Home also attempts to express the inner consciousness of what defines home, and I encourage those who listen to this work to think about what home is for them.