Strings (Violins I, Violins II, Violas, Cellos, Double Basses)

The title of Next Week’s Trees comes from Mary Oliver’s poem Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks. During the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was deeply inspired by Oliver’s words—words that are a gentle reminder of the future’s uncertainty, the confident hope of the present, and the propulsive force of life that drives us through any doubt that a new day will arrive. In a way only Mary Oliver can, she assures us that the trees will still be there next week.

That balance between uncertainty and hope shapes the music. The piece begins with an extended use of echoing pizzicato, as if holding the listener in suspension, delaying what feels inevitable for a string orchestra: the warmth of bowed, arco sound. When this finally arrives, it feels like a release—both continuity and trust are restored. From there, the strings branch outward in waves of both fragility and fullness, circling back and pressing forward like the seasons themselves, which, without fail, return with each passing year.

Commissioned by the California Symphony as part of their Young American Composer-in-Residence program, Next Week’s Trees is a meditation on the persistence of hope in an ever-fragile world. I revised the work in 2023 with insights discovered while writing a sister work, Now and Then, a Neo-Baroque work for harpsichord and chamber orchestra composed during a residency with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Since its premiere, I have reimagined Next Week’s Trees in new forms: as a percussion quartet for Sandbox Percussion, a marimba-and-cello duo for New Morse Code, a double string quartet for Kronos Quartet, and even as Heart on Fire—a piece for winds inspired by another line from the same Oliver poem—where the themes themselves travel into “next week,” and are cast in a new, searing light.