Instrumentation

Choir (SATB, some divisi up to 8 parts + solos for 2 Altos and 1 Tenor)

Percussion Quartet

P1 – Vibraphone (shared with quartet), finger picks, two bows

P2 – Vibraphone (shared with quartet), Marimba (shared), finger picks, two bows

P3 – Vibraphone (shared with quartet), Marimba (shared), finger picks, two bows

P4 – Vibraphone (shared with quartet), Synthesizer, Kick Drum, Sand Block

Program Note

In the summer of 2020, my wife and I moved to Boulder, Colorado. For the first time in our lives, climate change was staring us straight in the face. We’ve seen wildfire after wildfire caused by decreased rainfall. We’ve seen our community threatened time and time again. We’ve had family evacuate. We’ve watched in horror from our back deck as we saw a thousand homes burn in the distance in the Marshall Fire on New Year’s Eve, 2021.

After a while of living in this place, you begin to accept that there is no such concept as ‘safety’ anymore. That there is no longer such a thing as “fire season” because it is now the everyday occurrence. We live in constant danger. We’re told it will only get worse. On a recent walk in Boulder with my dear friend and poet Molly Moses, we bonded over our newfound obsession with rain. We shared our obsessive joy of experiencing drop after drop of water falling to the ground from the sky. And we coveted the knowledge that we are safe for now—that we can breathe for just a moment before the dust and fire returns.

Molly sent me her poem “Raindrops.” That poem became this piece.

dust to dusk is a meditation—an obsession—over the joy of rainfall.

- Annika K. Socolofsky, July 1, 2022