breaking day (2024)
Orchestra - picc.2.3.2.bcl.2.cbsn—4.3.3.1.—timp—3perc.—hp—strings
Duration: 7’
Read by Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra and Ken Yanagisawa (cond.), 7/20/2024 at Klein Music Tent, Aspen CO
Program note
The early inspiration behind Breaking Day came about after weeks of near-daily trips to watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean in the winter of late 2023 and early 2024. This past winter, I visited my hometown of Encinitas, California, a northern suburb of San Diego. A childhood friend of mine, Tiffany, was also in town. One day in late December, she asked if I’d like to see the sun set at Moonlight Beach, which was 10 minutes by car from my house. I thought it sounded like a beautiful idea––it had been nearly a year since the last time I saw a pacific sunset––so we met shortly after. This initial sunset watching became a routine of ours that unfolded over three weeks in December and early January.
Each sunset viewing emerged as an opportunity for vulnerability and reflection. Once as a child, I noticed a cloud-marbled, sunburst pinkish rouge sky from the passenger seat of our family’s 2003 Honda Odyssey. I didn’t have the language to describe how much the visual impact of the sky had moved me, and I asked my mom if there would ever be a sunset like this ever again, to which she replied that there wouldn’t, that this sunset would never happen again. I mentioned that story to Tiffany one day, how significant it was to me that this moment would never happen again, that the light would never fade and fizzle away in the same manner twice, that it made me grateful to be alive and to savor my own breath, that it made me grateful to live in a life where I was able to eat delicious food and to have experienced love and to have met beautiful people and have forged deep personal bonds. Each descent of the sun beyond the horizon, in retrospect, strikes like the hours on a clock, each day a click or clip or thunk, melting into my visual memory. Each descent of the sun reminded me of my mortality and reminded me that the longer we live, the more likely we are to experience loss. In my head, I comforted myself by saying that each descent of the sun prepares us for the next, and that eventually loss won’t seem so scary anymore.
Breaking Day draws some of its musical inspiration from “Lever du jour” from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a lush movement that musically represents the process of an unfolding musical sunrise. The form of Breaking Day loosely traces the progression from dawn to dusk, from the morning unveiling of the sun, to bright daylight planing at noon, to an intensely burning sunset.
One cloudy winter evening right after sunset at Moonlight Beach, the sky was split in two, one side red, the other blue. I found this moment beautiful and poetic, and in the ending of this piece, I attempt to represent a splitting sky as the sun disappears behind the ocean.