This symphony is a testament to the last painful months of my father’s life in the Winter of 1995. It is a musical examination of the philosophical implications of death and dying, as well as a deeply personal effort to uncover a connecting thread of logic within the highly irrational stream of events that led to my father’s death.

The title of the work, “Shards,” is rich in connotation. Literally, shards are the irregularly-formed, fragmented remains of a brittle substance (glass, metal, or perhaps a life shattered into memories.) In one sense, shards are objects which inspire feelings of dread; born out of violence, their dangerously sharp edges can easily slice through skin. Indeed, they force us to be conscious of our own mortality.

On the other hand, shards are also objects of great beauty and clarity: each crystalline fragment is a unique and exquisite collection of angles, which, despite its previous existence as merely part of a greater whole, now exists independently, according to its own geometry. Each bears its own meaning, uninhibited by its former context. Shards, then, are a metaphor for beauty arising from destruction, death and rebirth.

These ideas, translated into music, permeate the entire four-movement work. Movement I, “Between the Hammers” opens with thunderous bell-like gestures, here represented by the hard, uncompromising interval of a perfect fourth spread out over six octaves and played by the tuba and piccolo. This “motive” and several other jagged motives reoccur unvaried throughout the piece, but they acquire new meanings by the perpetual transformation of the context surrounding them. From the brutal fanfare of the first movement, to the dreamy polyphonic processional of movement II, “Across the Porcelain of Evening,” to the desolate expressionistic landscape of movement III, “The Sleeper is Sinking,” to the relentless thrash rock of the last movement, "The Burning Fountain," “Shards” is a study of metamorphosis. In the words of Rainer Marie Rilke, “...Here in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang...”