Project:
An opera and a symphonic work. The first is to continue work
on the music and libretto for my opera, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, based
on Ernest Hemingway's short story of the same name and to complete the fourth
and final movement of my symphonic work Elements for Orchestra.
The compositional material that's before me is
a set of "mini-stories" which the main character, a writer named Barry,
imagines as he lies dying. He recounts outlines for stories that he never wrote,
some a passing image of a scene, some an outline for a novel. These are stories
of his past (often reflecting Hemingway's own life), and stories about the snow,
inspired by the distant peak of Kilimanjaro that the character has in his sight.
This Pirandello aspect of stories within a story are a prominent feature
of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. They need to be woven into the main storyline
of the drama in order to understand Harry and how he arrived at this moment
of his life — dying from a neglected wound at the foot of a mountain. This complex
narrative is a great challenge for the opera's composition structure and dramaturgy.
It is also my intension to stay as close to Hemingway's text as possible.
The second is to complete my symphonic work Elements
4 (fire) for Orchestra. Each movement of this work is inspired by
one of the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The fourth movement,
"Fire," is about fire and its interplay with sunlight — the play of
fire light on water, reflections and shadows of fire light and smoke on the
ground (which looks like flowing water). | 
