Paleography in Platinum (2008)

Paleography in Platinum is a piece for symphony orchestra. Its influences include the music of Francis Poulenc, Charles Trenet, Vasily Kalinnikov, and various film/television scores. This willful indebtedness to models of the past is acknowledged somewhat pleonastically in the title. Paleography is defined as the study of ancient writing systems and was chosen here to describe the adoption of older musical styles. Platinum refers to an early monochrome photographic printing process, which some photographers still use nowadays, both as means of dialoging with the past and as a way of availing themselves to the particular expressivity of that medium.