Pale In Your Shadow

Pale In Your Shadow, written for Fifth House Ensemble, responds to a question: what responsibility do we have for what happened before we were alive? The question, posed during the commission process, immediately brought to mind the concept of generational curses—specifically, breaking generational curses. That language—“breaking curses”—summons up violent, physical imagery, a hammer blow to break the chains, to rid us of generational loose ends. It imagines our forebears as the antagonists and us as the protagonists, neatly delineating consequence and blame. In reality, intergenerational trauma often defies these neat definitions: some wounds are intentional, some not—some people had choices, some didn’t—sometimes, someone’s harmful actions grew from the broken circumstances they themselves inherited. In many cases, blame is warranted, but we only reach that space once we soften to a difficult reality: sometimes, those who caused the harm we inherit were simply people trying (if sometimes failing) to do their best. While this doesn’t relieve anyone of blame, it might help us eventually redirect and reassess the destructive cycles. Pale In Your Shadow approaches, in its own small way, that duality: moving between the desire to break curses with sheer force and the reality of breaking them with an openness of understanding.