Gie

Giè was written for the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble for their concert of world-influenced new music by Western-heritage composers. This piece is mysterious, lyrical, and asks for the players to sing toward the end. Bringing ancient and modern together, Giè combines word games, late medieval sensibility, quasi-improvisation, modern instruments and traditional djembe playing into a gentle fabric of sound that might be heard anywhere in the world. A modified palindrome, the music twists and turns back on itself, weaving non-retrogradable rhythms into open fourths and fifths, sweet chords, and even the momentary transfer of sound to the ensemble players’ voices—singing scat-like unabashedly on the street corner or in the shower. Giè—the word means “interruptions” in Latvian—keeps interrupting itself to change its path through time while trying to retrace that very path home.