Vibran

I was originally invited to write a piece for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra around the theme of Carnival: a festive event celebrated throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Carnival represents freedom of creative, artistic, and spiritual expression amongst a people whose freedoms are still suppressed. To interpolate the entirety of its colorful kinetic energy wrapped around beautiful autonomous Black bodies that hold everything from joy to deep generational sorrow in one piece of music was an impossible task. Instead, I attempted to capture a suspended moment in time, asking myself, “what might just one second of the glorious feeling of Carnival sound like if we could slow it down and zoom in on it?”. Vibran, the word for vibrant in Haitian Creole, captures the warm and sublime yet overwhelming sensation of this moment through my own imagination. The work opens with a gentle melodic line in the flute and violins underscored by lush chords in the lower strings and woodwinds that give a sense of both safety and comfort. The energy then shifts abruptly into a patterned ostinato in the vibraphone that is almost absurd in its happiness, anchored by rhythmic and playful interjections in the rest of the ensemble. The energy of this rises, like being jostled around in a wheel of color, and gives way to a chorus of pulsing, heavy, and overwhelming calls from each instrument group, accompanied by a churning underbelly in the violins. Eventually, the piece lands us in a space that feels transcendent and clear-eyed. The warmth of the opening chords returns in the lower strings with new gently accented versions appearing in the winds and brass, all surrounding a melody in the violins that seems to be searching and longing for something just out of reach. Vibran is meant to sound like a single moment that fleetingly connects you to a tiny piece of happiness shared by our ancestors.