Instrumentation: saxophone ensemble (SSAATTBBBs)

Duration: 18’

Premiere: South Sound Saxophone Ensemble, October 27th 2024—Lagerquist Concert Hall, Tacoma (WA)

Program notes

Morning Comes Always is a paean to the irrepressible and renewing force that can give us a fresh start each day, causes us to create, and leads us to work for something bigger than ourselves. Though the title seems more than faintly related to “joy comes in the morning”—the ending is certainly a joyful shout—it’s not intentionally or explicitly biblical.

Sometimes there are days that go from bad to worse. Nothing specific happens, but a series of small things tilt your emotional state negative and then it becomes a self-reinforcing process. By evening you feel without worth or purpose or joy. On the worst of these days, just before going to sleep, you might experience the thought of how nice it would be to sleep and not wake up at all. The first two movements (I. Gloaming and II. Midnight) trace this arc.

Between night and morning, perhaps dreams not remembered transform you, perhaps something else intervenes—it’s not quite clear what happens—but come morning, those feelings and notions that weighed you down and cast such a significant and definitive judgement on you have almost totally evaporated. You gently prod at the memory of yesterday’s thoughts and black gloom like a missing tooth, trying to see what it was all about. But it’s as if yesterday’s verdict has no power in the light of a new day. You experience a renewed and unblemished joy for being alive. The third and fourth movements (III. (dreams) and IV. Morning) express this arc.

The pivot point of this music is the third movement III. (dreams) and bears saying a bit more about: Growing up, my parents would often drop me and my brother off to spend the night at grandma’s, who then lived in the Kent/Green River Valley south of Seattle, not too far from the train tracks running through the valley. Come bedtime, I remember grandma tucking us in and falling asleep to the mournful muffled sounds of trains blowing their horns a couple miles away, rumbling down the valley through the dark - a sound I’ve associated with comfort and safety ever since. The pitches that make up my favorite train horn became a doorway for this movement, transformed into something spectral and arpeggiated, passed between the upper voices to give the music an ethereal but forward-moving sound, carrying us away from the darkness. Meanwhile, below the floating, something deep quietly works under the level of consciousness - a renewing force that can keep us going, making the world new and fresh with possibility each day.

I. Gloaming

II. Midnight

III. (dreams)

IV. Morning