Metasomatic: Bifurcations was a turning point for me as a composer. For years, I had been somewhat disconnected from the cello as a medium for composing, partly because I had grown tired of hearing so many clichés in new music, which I personally perpetuated, and which didn’t sit well with me as a cellist—I stopped playing for years because of this, and that influenced my composing in ways which I didn’t anticipate. After a series of concerts where I felt alienated from pieces I had written without any acoustic reference, I felt compelled to change my approach and the cello was the most welcoming place to start. I began exploring harmonics and multiphonics, trying to understand the slight changes and gradations of color that emerge with subtle nuances of the bow pressure, contact point, left-hand finger pressure, vibrato, trills, and so forth—even the room has a particular response to these nuances. Since I was interested primarily in natural harmonics, I felt it was important to explore various scordaturas to escape from the 5th-related harmonics present on stringed instruments. The important thing is that my ears were influencing my composing in a much more dynamic way, and for the first time, I really felt emotionally connected to the work on a deep level.

“Meta-” for me can be defined as both transcendental, as in “metaphysical,” and "change, as in “metamorphosis,” while “-somatic” refers to the body. The title was born out of a desire to be encapsulate dynamic musical shapes without limiting an interpretation explicitly to what is literally happening in the piece. In the piece, I chose to use trills as the primary source of all musical exploration. A trill is, simply put, the alternation between two states. I searched for various ways to use that concept, from the surface of the music to the deepest structural level. Counterpoint, dynamics, register, timbre, form—they all respond to the binary nature of the trill, alternating from one end of the spectrum to the other in any given parameter throughout the piece.