“I have always held a deep love for the pacific northwest. The Opal Sea serves as my
musical love letter to this gorgeous region. Ella Higginson was a pacific northwest
based poet around the turn of the 20th century, and upon finding this beautiful sonnet
she wrote about the Salish Sea in Washington, I immediately knew that I wanted to use
it. I constructed this piece as something of a call and response between the poet and
the nature that she describes.
The harp (or piano) repeats variations on the same motive with small elaborations each
time, as one looking out over the scene of the sea would see the same image, but
notice something small and new each time. In response to these images, the choral
response echoes the romantic artistic philosophy that it will always be the objective of
art to effectively capture the beauty of nature, and it will always be the fate of art to
fail. The choral sections imitate elements of the primary theme, but with small
alterations that separate them sonically, then as the po
