For Julius Eastman
For winds, marimba/vibraphone, sleigh bells, piano and bass
Unlike the ponderous lavishing of rainfall, snow descends with delicacy and sanctifies the blemished earth with grace de l'impunité. Her immediate destination is not the soil. Unlike rain, she finds herself comfortable in adagio or andante, while rain firmly insists on allegro. Rain prefers the earth, but her majesty often fancies possessions of a more angelic nature; the angel of snow quenches her aesthetic pleasures within a milky yet opaque and ghastly crystallization from the fragments of Pluto or Chiron. Whenever she unleashes her celestial wrath, know that there is an angel gliding above your village drowning the sin abroad.
The caress of the angel, the crystalline dawn of her angelic tears upon the surface of the earth, manifests as a specter of purity and delicacy which blissfully sanctifies the land below. Wind is for hugging, snow is for kissing, and the angel kindly accepts kisses from all.
Each reiteration, the artist conjures up another blanket of snow, while each of his sentient coatings of snow hugs the air.