My piece, Virga, has been a long time coming. The original idea for the melody and the driving ostinato originated from a road trip with my father some time in 2013. The ideas remained as sketches for several years as I didn’t want to waste what I knew to be a fertile ground.
In the winter months of 2018, recently married and struggling to understand my personal identity within the unity of our marriage, I told my wife, Amber, that I would complete Virga by August and send it to a professor to at least get their feedback on its compositional merit.
I had recently performed with the BYU Symphonic Band under the direction of Dr. Kirt Saville, whom I esteem as one of the greatest music educators I have ever known. I asked for his feedback on a different piece and his feedback was candid and precisely what I needed to know how to grow. One of the key take away was the idea of bounding myself—setting limits on the length, difficulty, and scope of a particular work. Just as a the form of a sonata may seem to constrain a poem, it’s also the form that somehow elicits deeper meaning from the words within.
I set limits on the length of Virga and honed in the scope of the piece to try and encapsulate only the very essence of the cyclical nature of water precipitating and evaporating simultaneously. That structure is what freed me from my hesitancy to move forward with the piece (“ensayar el tema”).
Almost six years after the initial seeds for Virga were planted, the piece was brought into beautiful fruition by the very man who was kind enough to give me feedback. When I sent Dr. Saville the first version of Virga, he gave some additional pointers regarding the orchestration. Then, much to my delight he wrote back in email, “let’s do it.”
You can listen to a recording of the premiere performance by visiting: www.MountainsideMusic.com/virga
