Wings of Change

Wings of Change for brass quintet is inspired by both fairy mythology and kindness breaking cycles. It is a programmatic work based on my own short story, which features a girl rejecting a generational narrative, and her mother beginning to open her heart to change.

A mom and her daughter live out in a cottage near the woods. One lovely spring day, the daughter is out playing and sees a couple of fairies dancing! She quietly runs back home to tell her mom the mythical sight that she saw! Her mom immediately gets upset. She tells her all about the misfortune fairies had brought her family as a child. She told the daughter to stay away from them, and that she’s not allowed in the woods anymore. The daughter did not want to believe her mother. How could creatures that beautiful cause any kind of misfortune? So, the next day she built a little house for the fairies in a flower bush near the edge of her yard. From old tales she knew, they drink milk and honey, so she left some to show the fairies she means no harm. The next morning, her mother was in a particularly good mood for the first time in years. She was even singing in the kitchen as she was making breakfast! The daughter went to check on the house and found that the milk was gone! She asked her mom to take her to the library to do research on the myth of fairies. She agreed, and they went to learn about them together. The daughter continued to fill the fairy house with gifts, and let them be. The mother and daughter continued their happy little life together.

This composition tells the story through four movements, loosely based on four baroque dance styles: gigue, courante, sarabande, and minuet. Each movement features the related meter and tempo of each style, and includes a few compositional features from each. The gigue-inspired movement includes fast rhythms with imitation, the courante-inspired movement contains conflicting rhythms, and the sarabande-inspired movement features stress on the upbeat. Outside of the few key features, the movements have unique compositional features of their own, such as sudden harmonic transformation in certain sections, creating more forward motion. The final movement uses mixed meter. The second movement features a large chordal section, with all the voices stacked in open harmony, and each voice moves up or down in small increments divergently, creating a unique and randomly generated dissonance.