Program Note:
'Dust' takes inspiration from an excerpt of "The Captain of the Men of Death" by Australian writer Richard James Allen (The Short Story of You and I, 2019). This excerpt describes the erratic undoing of carefully constructed lives that can occur when experiencing a serious illness. Allen describes the way in which "everything that was so deftly woven... becomes messy, unjoined, disconnected, gaps appear everywhere with no rhymes or reasons". The form of Dust reflects the structure and pacing of the poem as the deconstruction of the initial ideas lead to the "hideous cacophony and dreadful silence of before and after we humans pushed our cloven hooves into this dust".
'Dust' was written for Alarm Will Sound to be premiered at the Mizzou International Composers Festival in 2019.
