Umbra II, for flute, voice, guitar, and percussion, was written for and premiered by the Fonema Consort on March 23, 2018 at Scripps College.

The piece Is a direct continuation of the piece Umbra, written for Fonema Consort the previous year. In the both pieces, I was fascinated by a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, that poetically described shadows of figures in the desert sand, like “pencil lines,” or “tentacles of darkness.” I used these as a jumping off point to explore the acoustic properties of phonemes related to words like as “darkness” and “shadows,” and my goal was to explore the various densities of shadows through register and orchestration.

I tried to orchestrate every sound around a vocal utterance, where every instrument is an extension of the voice, like a surreal hybrid. Each performer was given a vocal part that complemented their instrumental role in the piece. This served as a constant reminder of the voice and its abstraction through translation into acoustic matter. While the words have been distorted beyond semantic recognition, their expressivity was preserved, living on as pure emotion.