for electric guitar, bass guitar, drum set, piano and electronics
The idea of this piece is inspired by the German-born artist Anselm Kiefer and is based on a series of his landscape paintings owned by the Hall Art Foundation (publicly exhibited from October 20, 2007 to February 28, 2010).
This series is characterized by Kiefer’s distinct visual language, in which a low-angle perspective nearly cuts off the dark, clouded sky. Other defining features of his work include thick layers of oil paint that create an extremely dense, tactile surface, lending a pronounced sense of physical depth, as well as an enormous scale (ranging from 2.5 × 5 to 2.5 × 7 meters). The size and complexity of these paintings overwhelm the viewer and introduce a strong temporal dimension: one must physically move along the canvas to observe its details.
The first movement, soil, is based on Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (“Let the earth be opened and bring forth a Savior”). Kiefer’s emphasis on soil imagery is translated musically into the aged sounds of a vinyl record player at the opening of the movement, filtered noise, piano timbres transformed through granular processing, and distorted electric guitars.
The second movement, Fleurs sous la pluie, reflects the imagery of Rorate caeli et nubes pluant iustum (“Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just”). This movement explores subtle nuances of a rainy sky and draws heavily on the sense of freedom inherent in improvised music.
The next painting, Olympus – for Victor Hugo, references a poem by Victor Hugo composed in 1837. It recounts the poet’s return to memories shared with his mistress, Juliette Drouet, and resonates deeply with nostalgia and the bittersweet awareness of the passage of time. Excerpts from Olympio’s Sadness, translated by Garrett Medlock (used with permission), and an unnamed author from Henry Llewellyn Williams’s 1908 collection (Boston: Jefferson Press) are incorporated into this movement as narrated speech and fixed-media electronics, amplifying my reflections on homesickness and separation.
The final movement is based on the most dramatic painting in the series, Nachricht vom Fall Trojas (“News of the Fall of Troy”). Throughout the movement, an overdriven, screaming electric guitar frequently occupies its highest register, set against a monotonous, almost stupefying ostinato in the bass guitar and drum set parts. The burning of Troy draws heavily on elements of progressive rock, further blurring genre boundaries within this symphonic cycle written for the rock band.
In this work, I sought to capture the visual qualities of Kiefer’s paintings through multilayered, dense textures, large-scale formal design, and an emphasis on gradual transformations between musical states over extended spans of time. However, many of the artist’s ideas also resonated with my own reflections. Ultimately, Kiefer’s religious references transformed into an expression of anguish caused by the absence of a defining element of the landscape—the sky. At the end of the final movement, the music’s perpetual motion abruptly disappears, symbolizing an escape beyond the boundaries of Kiefer’s landscapes and fulfilling the human pursuit of the heavens.
I am grateful to Wesley Thompson for his advice and support in the process of creating the soil; to Jee Won Kim for recording the poem by Victor Hugo for the third movement; and to Taylor DiClemente and Zhengji Li for performing the guitar parts in a partial premiere of the first movement in March 2025 at my doctoral recital in Auer Hall at Indiana University.
This piece was written for Overtuned Fest and received its complete premiere during the festival’s inaugural edition on February 23, 2026. It is dedicated to its first performers: Christopher Herz, Bracey Scott, and Noah Lopez.
Duration: ca. 40 minutes
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