I wrote an orchestral piece over the past few months, and created a mock-up audio representation. I recently created a music video to accompany it. Check it out! The program notes for the music and the program notes for the video are below.

About the music:

“A puzzle revealed” is dedicated to my wife’s and my first child, and was written while the child was not born yet. The two movements are titled as if the child were a boy or a girl (we were not sure of the sex of the child before birth).

One of the most intriguing activities I enjoyed with my wife while she was pregnant, was speculation on what the child would look like, what their personality would be, if they would sleep a lot or be like us as babies (we were insomniacs), and many other inquiries. In short, the child was a puzzle. And, in fact, the child will always be a puzzle. We are all puzzles ourselves. The ironic thing is that this music has many very hidden references to the names of the child we had picked out (we had a boy and a girl name picked out), but besides that, this is essentially absolute music.

I tend to write absolute music, and this is no exception. Yes, the goal was to write a piece for our child, and the names that we had picked out are very hidden in the musical content, but there is nothing really programmatic about this. Any connections between this and a child’s nature are completely up to you to interpret for yourself.

“A puzzle revealed” will likely never be performed because of the huge forces required, as well as the virtuosity of the music. But, I wanted and needed to write it. This was a piece that had to happen, flowing from me as easily as the love I already have for my child, and the love I assume that will only grow with each day I spend with the child once he or she is born.

Dan Lis, Hartford, CT, August 17, 2019

About the video:

This video circles around the idea of puzzle pieces; the colored shapes represent puzzle pieces of what the child may look like. The flowers represent the solution to the puzzle pieces–the beauty of the puzzle once solved. The final product is displayed as the ultrasound of the child early in the pregnancy. Even though the music is not programmatic, the video is definitely tied to the idea of a puzzle and is not completely abstract or absolute.

Dan Lis, Hartford, CT, September 11, 2019