Reflections on Frost springs from a decision I made at the age of nineteen to expose myself to more poetry. I had admired poetry for a long time, but had never found the time to dig into it and find more of what I love and connect with. So, during an outing to Chicago (for the premiere of my orchestral work Young Voices), I stopped in a bookstore and decided to buy Robert Frost’s New Hampshire. I thought to myself, I’ve heard his name before, plenty of times. He’s supposed to be one of the greats, right? With that thinking, I began reading his work. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with the poems within, and over the course of a year I moved slowly through the book, trying to soak up as much of each poem as I could. Each of the five movements of Reflections on Frost are a musical response to one of my favorite poems within the book, and they take their titles from lines found within those poems.
the mountains I raise is inspired by Gathering Leaves. Like the poem, this movement is short and lighthearted, and like the mountains of fallen leaves Frost describes, it disappears as quickly as it appears.
earth returned their love is inspired by Two Look at Two. In this poem, two travelers in the woods encounter two deer consecutively and are briefly spellbound by this rare experience. Coincidentally, not long before I prepared to compose this movement, I had an incredibly similar encounter with several deer while walking through the woods. The reverence I felt for those beautiful creatures and for the nature in which I was present is a feeling I will never forget and aimed to capture in this movement.
She went out like a firefly is inspired by Paul’s Wife. This movement takes a more programmatic approach. It utilizes a pentatonic melody that, although original, is intended to emulate many American folk melodies and that represents Paul Bunyan, as well as a twinkling motif and a peculiar musical scale that represent the supernatural wife described in the poem. The movement presents these ideas and then combines them, representing their strange union, and the movement ends with a depiction of the “shout” in the story reaching the wife’s ears and the sound of her going out “like a firefly”.
To the midnight sky a sunset glow is inspired by The Need of Being Versed in Country Things. This movement, like the poem, is a nostalgic and mournful ode to the perseverance and indifference of nature to the happenings of the human world.
For once, then, something is inspired by For Once, Then, Something. In the poem, the speaker describes their struggle to see through their reflection in a well, and a time in which, for one brief moment, they discovered a flash of something else in the bottom of the well before the water blocked it from their view once more. The poem ends with the speaker wondering what that vision could have been. This movement begins with the rippling water of the well and lets a melody sing through the ripples for brief moments before the water clears completely to let the melody shine in ecstatic revelation. Just as quickly as it settled, the water ripples once again, obscuring the brief vision. This movement attempts to ask the same questions of its melody as the speaker asked of their vision: “What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.”