Concert Music

The percussion ensemble was very loosely inspired by—and draws its title from—a book I read many years ago: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It’s an epic work, but the overarching storyline follows the building of a new cathedral in medieval England. Throughout the novel, Follett shows the hardships of the times, the struggle of building the structure, and the triumph of the eventual completion of the cathedral. I tried to create an ethereal atmosphere for the piece to mirror the religious undertones of the novel. There is only one melodic line used in the piece, and I wrote it after listening to old church hymns and chorales. First heard in the xylophone, all of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material in the piece results from varying, fragmenting, augmenting, inverting, and otherwise manipulating this single line.

This piece was inspired primarily by a few melodies drawn from various sources that I wanted to tweak and use in my own work. Each movement is significantly different from the others, and each had a unique source of inspiration. While it’s not the main theme in any movement, there is a secondary theme that is used verbatim in each movement to help tie them together. Because of these drastic differences, I use the secondary theme as a type of subtle variation form for the quartet as a whole.

I chose two poems from Edgar Allan Poe that I juxtaposed and used together to create a storyline. The baritone is an older man who sings in a folk song style and is reminiscing about the love of his life who died when he was young (Annabel Lee). The tenor’s sections represent a flashback where the singer is the same man at the time of his love’s death (A Dream Within a Dream). They join and sing together at the end, demonstrating that love and loss are both timeless, and that the man’s grief is everlasting.

Hayden Lane

Rhapsody on a Theme by Ravel

"A Punctual Humanity"

Pillars of the Earth

String Quartet No. 1

Annabel Lee

Two poems by Edgar Allan Poe