Speak in Thunder was composed during the spring and summer of 2026 as a commission from New Music Lab for the Quasar Saxophone Quartet and a string ensemble. The work grew from a poem I composed in late 2025 in which a prairie thunderstorm becomes both a physical event and a ritual of memory: wind moves across dry grass, rain releases dust from the earth, and thunder exposes the fragility shared by all living things. Within the poem, thunder gradually becomes more than a natural force. It becomes the remembered voice of someone lost; overwhelming, consoling, and briefly present again.

The composition is loosely modelled on a Baroque concerto grosso. The saxophone quartet functions as a contemporary concertino, set within and against the larger body of strings (ripieno). This distinction is deliberately fluid. At times the saxophones emerge as individual voices; at others they fuse into a single breath or become absorbed into the surrounding string sonorities. The two groups transform one another rather than maintaining fixed roles.

The work is driven primarily by texture. Small motivic cells unfold gradually through overlapping layers of sustained sound, narrow melodic turns, glissandi, repeated pulses, dynamic swells, and accumulating instrumental activity. Rather than depicting a thunderstorm literally, the music follows its ritual-like cycle: anticipation, gathering pressure, rupture, dissipation, and renewal. The score begins Lacrimoso, with fragile lines suspended over a dark resonance. As the materials multiply, the musical atmosphere becomes increasingly charged. After periods of concentrated rhythmic and textural intensity, the music returns in altered and increasingly vulnerable forms, finally receding toward silence.

Dedicated to my brother, Speak in Thunder concerns the ways shared grief changes the atmosphere of living. The storm becomes an analogue for loss: a force that breaks open the ordinary world, leaves it transformed, and yet carries within it the possibility of renewed air. The work does not seek resolution so much as a moment of “shattering peace” where an absent voice might be heard once more inside the thunder.