""mirrors" for mixed choir and sextet" genre: Contemporary
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	Extended harmonic play with textual, vertical and horizontal mirrors.
	Story Behind the Song "mirrors" for mixed choir and instrumental sextet After the completion of the string quartet, I spent a great deal of time thinking about music history and theory trying to figure out where my harmonic ideas could fit into the larger picture. I re-analyzed my own works, especially the string quartet, which was mostly written by ear. From this analysis I began to understand the sounds that I tend to favor and where they come from. These harmonies are directly rooted in traditional Western tonality and base themselves on the expectations inherent in tonality. The Western ear developed listening to this music and intuitively understands its tendencies of tension and resolution. It was my goal with "mirrors" to consciously use these inherent tonal expectations and play upon them. I was drawn to the deceptive resolutions and delayed suspensions of Wagner and the impressionistic palette of Debussy. In "mirrors", I explore the definition of this word from several different angles. The sextet and the choir work in a different harmonic realm. The sextet's harmony is based on a first inversion minor triad above its real inversion -- a second inversion major triad. The sextet is divided into two teams of register which mirror each other around a fixed and sometimes moving focal center. At times the two teams split into three pairs which mirror each other in a related way. The choir's mirroring is not vertical, as in the sextet, but horizontal by way of imitative counterpoint. This counterpoint uses short themes which are varied much like that of twelve-tone music -- by inversion, retrograde and retrograde-inversions. To take the word "mirror" further I wrote a text that would divide the piece into sections and work with these sections by outlining various aspects of a mirror. The text: "An image of fiction, distorted, inverted perspective combine to reflect, cleary, the truth of what is real" is an inverted mirrored meaning text. For example, the word "image" is the inverted mirror of the word "real" and the word "fiction" is the inverted mirror of the word "truth" and so on. These words all pivot around the word "perspective" (an instrumental "combine" section appears prior to the "perspective" section thus balancing the text). The text is only set in fragments until the "clearly" section, the climax of the work, where the text is set in its entirety twice. The end of the piece goes through a textual devlopment with the choir finally dividing into six parts to mirror the sextet. Musicians: Andrea Horner - Conductor Adeline Mueller - Flute John Whooley - Clarinet Lisa Ricciuti - Bassoon Darcy Rindt - Viola Violincello - Hilary Clark Doublebass - Dan Robbins UCSC Chamber Singers: Jonanthan Hirsh Catherine Lombard Sandra Castleberry Carrie Cleaver Robin Ann Bricker Chris Goff Sonia Gariaeff Heather Tidrick Candace Roberts Heather Heliger Roma Olvera Lauren Rasmussen Marieka Schrader Brad Shrenk Willow Manspeaker Brian Maples Vail Keck Victor Lee Adam Hobbs Rena Pickens Bruce Rockwell Zack Train Shannon White Roger Scott Susannah Murray Mike Kripikov Brad Mayol Sarah McGreevy Natalie Widman Dale Summer Veronica Soto

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