The piece begins with an ominous and ambiguous chord spanning the range of the entire piano.
It represents the moment in which the lights are turned out for a child whose parents compel him simply to "go to sleep."
Finding himself surrounded by darkness, the fertile imagination of the child begins its journey. Chord masses merge and distort themselves, sudden sharp explosions break uneasy silences, and noisy, non-pitched sounds linger over a creepy plateau. Just when our hero believes he has conquered his fears, an unsettled rhythmic manifestation evolves from the darkness and erupts into a fervor, transforming a quite night into a battleground of the imagination. In writing this piece, I endeavored to create compelling sonic landscapes while preventing the material from taking a shape that is too concrete or rhetorically clear, thereby forcing myself to find novel solutions to the programmatic nature of the musical. I looked at my building blocks of this piece, pitches, duration, and dynamics, as musical objects whose positions change in relation to their related sounds, textures. and rhythms. The objects all return, but never exactly as they were, and never in the form of predictable repetition. It is the varying state between these pulsating objects that creates the musical context, rather than an overall forward movement. This duality of musical structuring and programmatic associations is where I hope to discover an interesting musical paradox.