2 harps, 2 pianos, and 4 flutes
11 minutes
2004

When I was living in New Haven I often ran through Edgewood Park. There was a pond in that park, and for several weeks I observed four swans swimming in that pond. Two were white and two were gray. This was a family of swans. I enjoyed observing that, as they floated about, they appeared in various combinations—white-white-gray-gray, white-gray-white-gray, gray-white-white-gray, etc.—and with various levels of overlap or distance between them. This composition is a simple attempt to fabricate in musical terms something of this situation—and, hopefully, in the process capture something of the sense of elegance, balance, and simple beauty that I observed in those swans in those moments. The piece consists of a “bed” of sound for four flutes—quietly murmuring, pulsing, undulating—and four passages of music, two for piano, two for harp, that occur and recur in various orders and overlaps.