Three Names was born of Vespro, the culminating performance of my July 2023 residency at Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome, inspired by Michiko Hirayama’s long-standing interest in Gregorian chant and my own intersecting histories with spirituality and experimental music.

Creating Three Names was like weaving a liturgy from life’s manifold threads: the seasons, my lifetime, our current moment, the people whose paths cross mine, the place of performance, the work, the breath. It is impossible to touch all these things intentionally; the ordering of the program and its staging seek to create a frame that can hold us here, just as a liturgy holds us in this life that we don’t understand and provides a frame for us to live with things as they are.