Transcendence

I moved to the finger lakes region of New York in 2021, into a big old farmhouse, with my family. For the first time ever in my adult life, I had a room of my own — an office with nothing else in it except for my books, my music equipment, and my desk and a chair. My child was in high school, in-person school was back in session, and the seminary where I work full-time had changed to a hybrid format where most of my teaching was online. I suddenly had a bit more time to myself, and with that time came a longing to compose new music again.

There are two tracks on this album that were pieced together by me on a computer, “The Greening” and “Transcendence.” This was a fun foray back into sequencing as I knew it in the late 1990s (I learned that things had changed a good deal) when I was a composition student at the University of Maryland. It was like finding an old part of myself that hadn’t seen the sun in decades and letting her get into the fresh air — it felt so good to be so engrossed in music again! There are other tracks that were composed while I was recording them, with multiple layers of harp — in other words, songs I cannot perform live, but which sound great on the cd. Nuc Vega, my former bandmate and former husband, also drove up to join me on a few tracks.

The title of the album came to me as I was working on what would become the title track, and received a call from Nuc letting me know that his and Posido’s father had died the night before. While he was no longer my father-in-law and I hadn’t seen him for many years, it was a moment of shock that led me into a place of contemplation on the mysteries of life and death.

I did a fun interview with The Hive about this album where I talk about some of the tracks more in depth - listen here.