In the LA Phil’s National Composers Intensive, new music composers and performers guide a group of emerging U.S. composers through the process of creating new work, from genesis to performance.

Note from the composer

Phantom Trails is a piece for solo violin that reimagines, reflects, and misremembers materials first heard in my string quartet piece Trails Bright Phantoms.

The quartet piece opens with a melodic fragment that is then frozen in midair, spinning, shimmering, and shivering in slow motion. In Phantom Trails we first come across the music in the form of “a melody almost frozen in time, but still inexorably spinning out (sucked into a vortex here, dallying in an eddy there)” (as it is described in the score) before it gradually begins to hint at something more melodic, finally blossoming for a moment into “a gauzy recollection, quasi-espressivo.”