For improvising ensemble, video projection, and imagination. Premiered by The BSC. 12 minutes, 34 seconds.

See score as PDF (right or control-click to download)

The dark has its own light.
A son has many fathers.
Stand by a slow stream:
Hear the sigh of what is.
Be a pleased rock
On a plain day.
Waking’s
Kissing.
Yes.
– Theodore Roethke, “O Thou Opening, O” in The Waking (find in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke)

I have always been interested in the ways that sound and image can come together. In The dark has its own light, I’ve created a video score consisting of several stills, or scenes, faded very slowly together. Images take the place of notes; suggestions take the place of notation. I like the idea of creating worlds where sounds ‘just are’ – rising and fading, perhaps, but without a human narrative arc. I also like the idea of conjuring slowly evolving musical worlds, and the way this idea might parallel the natural processes implicit in many of the photographs: the changes that sun, wind, rain, and most of all, time, bring to things. I would like to thank Fred Frith for his collection of photographic scores, Stone Brick Glass Wood Wire, which was a great inspiration to me.