Duration: 4 minutes
Instrumentation: 1111 / 1111 / 2perc / harp/piano / 1111. Substitutions and arrangements welcome.
This piece was composed during my high school years for my school orchestra. I began writing it after volunteering to clean up the Schuylkill River. What I saw there stuck with me: pools of motor oil, the bloated carcasses of fish, the detritus of an entire metropolitan region. But I was more disturbed by the quiet resignation from the adults, as though this could never change. At the time, I had just encountered the films of Hayao Miyazaki and other Japanese directors. These greatly influenced my ideas about stewardship of the natural world and nature as a sacred space. It showed me a new way that art that could speak to important social issues. I resolved to speak up about the river the best way I could at the time and originally named it Mizu.
Returning to this piece years later, it seems almost childlike in its sincerity. While a child’s vision for the future is sometimes dismissed as impossible, unreasonable, or naive, today, the Schuylkill River runs clear. With multi-use trails winding for miles, it is one of the most beautiful and flourishing urban river paths in the country. The future once believed impossible was, in truth, always possible – all it required was the political and economic will to act.
As a piece for youth orchestra, I hope it can serve as a reminder to attend to the voices of our younger generations and to uplift their vision of the world, which so often honors our innate desire to live in harmony with the world around us.
Clear was premiered in 2008 by the Springside Chestnut Hill Academy student orchestra, conducted by Dr. Ellen Fishman. It was subsequently performed by the Vermont Youth Philharmonia, conducted by Yutaka Kono in 2023.