Through the Air & Underground

ensemble 2.2.2.2, 2.2.0.0., timp + perc., strings
written fall 2025-spring 2026
duration 13 minutes

Commissioned by the Reno Chamber Orchestra for their 2025-26 Sound Investment Commission

program notes

I’ve spent most of my life in coastal urban centers, and consequently, I’ve always taken things like humidity and simple tree maintenance for granted. The first time I really considered how remarkable it was that trees of so many kinds could survive in so many different biomes was after encountering Richard Powers’s beautiful novel, The Overstory. The book’s incredible empathy for the natural world, mesmerizing prose, and structural ambition left a deep impression. When conductor Kelly Kuo reached out to me about composing a new work for the Reno Chamber Orchestra and its community, it was obvious to me what my piece would be about.

Through the Air & Underground takes its inspiration from the extraordinary ways plants and trees communicate, proliferate, and thrive in places as seemingly inhospitable as the high desert of Reno. The music is structured broadly in two halves, based on features of native flora: I. Anemochory and II. Mycorrhizae. The first half, named for the way seeds spread by riding the wind, is floaty and gentle. The music begins in the orchestra’s highest registers before gradually drifting downward and opening into florid melodies and textures. The second half, meanwhile, is named after the extensive fungal networks that enmesh themselves (symbiotically) in roots; these mycorrhizal networks facilitate communication and resource collection among communities of trees and plants. Here, the music is choppy and energetic, introducing motifs in the lowest reaches of the orchestra that rapidly transmit upward and outward. Finally, after building to a triumphant head, the piece concludes with a mercurial coda that ties both halves neatly together.

It was an honor serving as the 2025-26 Sound Investment Composer for the Reno Chamber Orchestra. I truly enjoyed getting to know the community, musicians, and landscape of the town, and I felt very lucky to get to write a new piece celebrating all these elements at once. Many thanks to Amy Heald and Kelly Kuo for believing in my work.