THE RAVEN (2026)

Suggested clean version:

THE RAVEN

Commissioned by NOVA LINEA MUSICA For Mak Grgić, Desirée Ruhstrat, and Wendy Sutter

Duration: 5 minutes | For Violin, Cello and Acoustic Guitar

Program Notes

There is a moment, sometimes, between one thing and another. Between sleep and waking. Between knowing and not knowing. Between who you used to be and whoever you are about to become. A time that usually passes too fast to be examined.

Across nearly every culture that has imagined it, the raven is the creature who watches that moment and seems to understand it. The Norse, the Celts, the alchemists of medieval Europe — all have versions in which ravens were consulted as oracles. Not because the birds were wise in a human way, but because they seemed to see through the categories that ordinary minds use to keep the world in place.

As a human, I find these thresholds quite maddening. To stand in the gap between an old self that has begun to dissolve and a new one that has not yet arrived — not knowing what comes next — can be unsettling. My mind reaches for ground that isn’t there. But I often find myself going back to the image of the raven, and try to have a different relationship to that state.

This work is about the idea of thresholds. It begins in stillness, passes through a kind of collapse of reality in a musical way, and at some point the instruments fall silent and only breath remains. It ends in suspension — inside the instant before whatever happens next.