(2026) THE RAVEN
Program note
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.
modeled after a hand-folded paper raven
For fun
Which bird would the augurs have read in you?
The Roman augurs marked out a piece of sky and waited to see which birds crossed it. The kind of bird, the direction, the call: each was a sign. Ten questions, one bird. Entirely unscientific.
The augurs read
What they saw
At the threshold
Entirely for fun. Nobody is only one bird.