Notes:

On Sunday, November 24, 2019, the Queen Hind, a cargo ship transporting live sheep from Romania to Saudi Arabia, capsized shortly after leaving the Black Sea port of Midia, drowning most of the 14,600 sheep on board. The vessel, built in 1980, had suffered engine failure the year before and had not been initially built to carry livestock. Crews working in the hours and days after the disaster were able to rescue 254 sheep; of these, 180 survived and were eventually moved to a Romanian animal sanctuary.

The overarching form is practically symmetrical: this is meant to illustrate both the literal upturning of the Queen Hind and the transition from life into death. During composition, I took particular inspiration from José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado’s Cartas Celestes, John Corigliano’s Etude Fantasy, Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Pleiades Dances, and Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack for the 1998-1999 anime series, Cowboy Bebop, as well as Henry Moore’s collection of pen-and-ink drawings, published in facsimile by Thames & Hudson as Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook.

The piece begins with a piece of floating debris - a fragment or shard of one of the following movements - and moves without pause into Black, where the performer silently depresses keys in order to allow the associated strings to resonate sympathetically with other struck notes. This represents the sound of metal cables snapping and reverberating throughout the ship. The third movement, Canon, starts with a lonely melodic line that is repeated and stacked in layers, building toward the middle and tapering off at the end, leaving the soloist once more alone. Overladen, written for the left hand alone, depicts the violently overpacked compartments of the ship and uses only three neighboring pitches (G, A, B-flat) across the wide compass of the instrument, with the exception of a fleeting F and E-flat at its climax. Composed shortly before the worldwide release of LLM (AI) technologies, Computer Blues comments on our ignorant and harmful habit of innovation for the sake of innovation despite profound environmental cost. It is intended to evoke the sound of computer-generated blues music while asking if the ship’s computer itself experienced its own death. The following movements, The Queen Hind capsized. and Birds, are played one into the other, without interruption. The former is from the perspective of the water flooding into the ship; the latter is from the perspective of birds flying overhead and is written for the right hand alone. Upside-Down Hymn finally reveals the context for the opening fragment and incorporates an upside-down reading of Chopin, which keen ears will recognize. The penultimate movement, Lost, opens with the bleating of sheep, the descending melodic motif given by removing notes from a chord rather than playing them. The middle section brings together themes heard earlier in the piece, and the movement ends with a restatement of the first notes from the earlier Canon. Toward the Mesopelagic is a postlude and creates the sensation of light shimmering and slowly disappearing as if one were descending into the ocean’s twilight zone. Meanwhile, bits of the ship and dead sheep drift through the water. Relying on substantial use of all three pedals (necessitating the crossing of feet), the music is as much in the shimmer and gradual decay of the strangely sustained harmonies as it is in the forte, struck notes. It ends with a solitary bubble, marked ppp. 

Elegy for Sheep was premiered at the Gene Marcus Piano Camp and Festival by the composer in 2025.