Picture Whimsies (for a Distracted Mind)

ensemble flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion
written winter 2018 - spring 2019, revised fall 2023
duration 35 minutes/20 minutes (2023 rev.)
premiered December 1 2019, Enoch Pratt Free Library by Roger Wu Fu (cond.), Adam Eydelson (fl.), Yu Wang (cl.), Claire Hebeisen (vln.), Rahel Lulseged (vc.), Sherry Du (pno.), Colin Crandal (perc.); revision premiered May 8 2025 by Mycelium New Music

Presented as part of the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Annual Artist Series, 2019-2020

When walking through galleries, I often wander through several different exhibits thinking that all the works are by the same artist. My inclination to ignore captions notwithstanding, such experiences have illustrated to me my tendency to draw on similarities from work to work. Every so often, paintings that might have nothing to do with one another might seem, to my eyes, quite related, sharing brushstrokes or color choices or subject matter or moods.

Picture Whimsies (for a Distracted Mind) was written in collaboration with Art10Baltimore, a collective of Baltimore-based painters. Each of them, without consulting the others, presented me with a painting of theirs that I would write a movement of music to. My hope was to create a suite of music that would invite listeners to extract a broad narrative where none was intended, much as I did when I first had the chance to see all of the paintings together. Though the movements seek to be fairly self-contained, I sought to imitate my own tendency to draw connections across (possibly unrelated) paintings by peppering motivic, timbral, or formal similarities between them.