Behind the Music
Almost five years went by without a recording.
I'm not going to dress that up. There wasn't a plan behind it and there wasn't a clean reason. Life changed, some of it for the better and some of it decidedly not, and the music stopped arriving the way it used to. Dry spells have a way of extending themselves. The longer you go without recording, the heavier the next session gets, until sitting down at all starts to feel like a statement you're not prepared to make.
"Resolution" is what finally ended it.
It came the way most of my music does, out of a mind map. No score, no plan, just hit record and play what's there. But what was there this time surprised me. It came out classical, or close to it, reaching back toward the training I spent my childhood resisting. Apparently five years of quiet sent me looking for the oldest thing I know how to do.
The piece is about transition. Not the tidy kind, where one chapter closes and another opens on schedule. The real kind, where good changes and bad changes arrive tangled together and you don't get to sort them out until much later. That's what the last several years handed me, and it's what the music worked out on its own before I understood what I was writing.
I also gave a voice to the violin, which is my favorite instrument in the world and the one I cannot play. I tried, briefly, as a kid. It didn't take. But there's a quality in that instrument I've never stopped chasing, a way it can ache and soar in the same phrase, and being unable to play it has never stopped me from hearing it in my head. Here I finally let it sing.
The title works two ways, and I intended both. There's resolution as an ending, the place a piece of music comes to rest. And there's resolution as a decision, the thing you commit to when the silence has gone on long enough.
This one's the second kind.