flotsam (2026)

Written: November 2025 — July 2026

Duration: 12’

Instrumentation: 1.1.1.1 + 1.1.1. + perc.[2] + hp + strings [1.1.1.1.1.]

Performance History

September 8, 2026: San Francisco Contemporary Music Players cond. Eric Dudley — Brava Theater, San Francisco CA (World Premiere)

Program Notes

“flotsam” is inspired by the children’s book of the same name by author/illustrator David Wiesner. The book is entirely wordless and tells its story through vivid watercolor pictures, inviting the reader to imagine their own narrative. Wiesner’s Flotsam depicts a young boy finds an old barnacle-covered camera on the beach. He develops the film to discover unbelievable images of underwater life, including robotic fish and starfish the size of islands. The final photo in the collection is perhaps the most interesting— a girl, holding a photo of a boy, who is holding a photo of a boy, who is holding a photo of a girl, and so on. Using his microscope, he sees eleven generations of these photos, going back an entire century. He decides to continue the cycle by taking his own photo and tossing the camera back out to sea for the next child to find.

As a child, reading Flotsam was so exciting because it was different every time. I would notice new things in the incredibly detailed illustrations that would change how I narrated the story. As an adult, I recently rediscovered the book and wondered what it would be like to create a musical narration for the book. Through the past eight months I have worked on this piece, I have struggled to encapsulate the entirety of Wiesner’s whimsical seascapes and the infinite sound worlds they imply. Instead, my piece is one example of a possible musical narrative, just as a child’s narration of the book is different every time.

My version of “flotsam” is split into three movements, vaguely following the structure of the book. The first movement, “beachcombing”, is an exploration of dry, crunchy, and choppy sounds. The second, “pelagic cities”, is directly inspired by Wiesner’s vivid underwater illustrations. The material is very arpeggiated and chordal with lots of harmonic and textural interruptions. The final movement, “mise en abyme”, uses the reveal of the photo-within-a-photo-within-a-photo-and so on as an architectural device. One musical idea is repeated eleven times, but with each repetition, a new idea is added, and then repeated quasi-verbatim in the next repetition. The phrase gets longer and longer every time it starts over until it reaches a natural breaking point.

“flotsam” was written with generous support from tan ARTZenter Emerging Composers Completion Grant. It was written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, conducted by Eric Dudley.