Performance by Western Illinois University Concert Choir, Sterling Burris, conductor, New Music Festival 2007.

Program Note

I inhale great draughts of space, (1987, Festival Version 1994) is a line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” My music tries to capture two images suggested by the text—breathing and spaciousness. Breathing is the formal model for rhythm, phrase structure, growth, and decay. In my sense of space, I was guided by an awareness of the Illinois landscape around me (my appreciation for which has developed slowly), a subtle landscape in which the apparent sameness is belied by innumerable variations in shape, texture, and color.