Etched in Smoke and Light (2022)

Etched in Smoke and Light is written in honor of my father, Jonathan Adolphe, a painter who loved working with translucent materials. I composed the work in the four months following his passing, reflecting on the immensely painful, visceral experience of losing him as well as the powerfully vibrant memories of love, joy, and play that he created with me and gave to me throughout our lives together. My father’s paintings contain traces of smoke, and they are transparent so that light can play across the work’s surface. His voice can be heard in the piano, my own in the violin, and the cello serves at times as an extension of my father, an extension of my internal world, and the voice of my mother. Both Jonathan’s artwork and this piece strive to capture the ephemeral nature of our reality, to reveal how creative expression enables us to hold on to and immortalize what is at once powerfully present and ultimately transient.