for solo vibraphone | 2025

duration | 7’

Commissioned by Riley Palmer

peruse the Score

Note

In the I Ching, hexagrams are built out of two kinds of lines: Yin, a broken line, and Yang, a solid line. Yin and Yang are constantly changing into one another. While “young” Yin and Yang are stable, a so called “old” Yin is in the process of changing into a Yang, and vice versa.

The first two hexagrams of the 64 within the I Ching are composed entirely of Yang lines and Yin lines, respectively. The first hexagram, Qián, composed entirely of Yang, is said to represent the creative essence, the power within the universe to endlessly create and repurpose. If any of the lines of Qián are “old” lines, it will change into one of the other 63 Hexagrams of the set. If all the lines of Qián are “old”, it will change into K’un, composed entirely of Yin and representing its opposite: a universal receptiveness.

My aim in the writing of this piece was to build a structure that lived within the ideology of the first hexagram, in which material was free to grow wildly around certain fixed ideas of motive, harmony, and rhythm. What emerged was a perpetuum mobile, of sorts, that reminds me of a joyfully overgrown garden; I imagine creation and development spilling out in all directions, to all corners.