Lute Island, Maine, is where [physicist Alan] Lightman’s journey begins. On a clear moonless night in a tiny motorboat on his way to this summer retreat, sensing something special about the moment, he turned off the running lights and engine, lay down on his back to take in the ocean of stars, and let himself go. “The boat disappeared. My body disappeared.

And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before.” Mystics and meditators aim for this sense of oneness with the universe, but Lightman’s just happened. “I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time—extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.” When he returned to an awareness of his body and boat, he “had no idea how long I’d been lying there.”

(Michael Shermer, Must Science Conflict with Spirituality?, New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2018)

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Inspired by Lightman’s transcendental experience on his motorboat, Ocean Black is a composition organized as an early music prolation canon consisting of seven notes. Arranged in a strict ordered series reminiscent of twelve- tone composition, this 7-note collection slowly unfolds through a set of typical pitch-class set transformations like inversion, transposition and retrograde. By combining these historically contrasting composition techniques, I wanted to experiment writing a work that was both highly organized and yet also incorporate all the unplanned harmonies that result from stacking horizontal melodic rows moving at different time scales—a seemingly arbitrary combination of notes that sound simultaneously pre-determined and ‘in’ the moment.