This Is Water

Shortly before I graduated, I was given a copy of This Is Water, David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College. I came to think of the speech as a long panning shot between two states of mind: one crowded with racing thoughts and driven by an insatiable desire for more, the other vast and open. They can feel worlds apart, even when nothing around them has changed. The speech became the basis of this piece: two movements that sound radically different yet are built from the same musical material. It is an attempt to capture the core idea of the speech, "the simple awareness of what is real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: 'This is water. This is water.' "