Huliau from Symphony of the Hawai‘i Seas (2025) Full OrchestraSunburnt (2017)
for saxophone quartet or bassoon quartet
duration: 8 minutes
Program Notes
The experience of getting sunburnt can be painful and yet the activity that led to the burn is often full of joy spent outdoors. This contradiction is something I often witness while living in Honolulu where sunscreen-deprived tourists spend hours at the beach and in the ocean without any care or worry for what will happen to their skin. Even after experiencing the pain of the sunburn, for some, it often seems like a kind of satisfying pain knowing that it is a result of enjoying their time outdoors.
Composing and sunburns tend not to go together very often, however. Perhaps, when I was composing this in the summer of 2017, I was feeling envious of the people nearby who were knowingly and purposefully putting themselves in harms way under the sun while I was composing this work in a dimly lit room. Sunburnt was originally written as a bassoon quartet for the Dark in the Song New Bassoon Collective, and was arranged for a saxophone quartet for the h2 Quartet.