Vrai

soprano, alto, tenor, baritone [2023]

With Vrai, I aimed to capture the transience and repetition of moments within dreams. The piece is constructed of four short movements that are deliberately contrasted with one another, with each movement exploring a distinct set of tableaus. Each sound world, much like one’s dreams, is ephemeral. Consequently, any notion of development is blurred, if not completely absent. As for the repetition used across Vrai, I was interested in the same things changing meaning based on their placement. Repetition and context invite contradiction; the excessive repetition of words may indeed emphasize it while also eroding away at its meaning and reducing the word to a purely phonetic entity. This sense of duality also manifests itself in the formal construction of the first and last movements; the latter is a “re-writing” of the former, using the same musical materials but with starkly different articulations. These moments of déjà vu, coupled with the seemingly non-sensical text, create small self-contained kernels of meaning throughout the piece. “Key, Eleison, Christe, Falling up”.