Music from elsewhere (Joshua Groffman)

The title “music from elsewhere” comes from a passage in Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bride and evokes, for me, a sense of dichotomy between two types of music: one that is fully present, audible, and familiar to us, and another which is more mysterious, emerging into our perception only in fits and starts - the "music from elsewhere." The idea of this dichotomy appealed to me because it seemed to capture a facet of the experience of daily life, namely, that if prosaic and familiar concerns largely shape our existence, they are occasionally interrupted by a sense that something larger and more fundamental is at work behind the scenes. Music from elsewhere attempts to capture that sense of an ineffable, larger something.
The piece evolves starting from thick, murky chords in the low winds and strings to high, bright ones in the flutes and violins, finally encompassing the entire ensemble at the climax. Alternating with these chords, which lack a clear sense of pulse, is another type of music that is sharply rhythmic, often heard as thumping attacks in the basses and percussion. These two elements continually emerge from and subsume each other, and at the center of the piece, they finally merge into a series of hammering chords for the entire ensemble. These hammering chords continue to reassert themselves as the piece closes, but in shorter and shorter outbursts. Never beaten, they simply vanish as the murky texture from the beginning re-emerges. The work is a circle; the music does not die away or end, but continues, elsewhere, out of our hearing but always present.