Welcome

For flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

One of my fondest college memories was the experience of arriving at a dining hall right as it opened and sitting with my meal by the entrance, slowly watching it fill up with people. The fun in doing this was the slow evolution from one or two voices into a mass of conversational sound. Considering that every dining hall at my alma mater has been closed and out of operation for nearly a year from the time I write this, I am haunted by these memories. The ability to congregate with hundreds of other people has gone from commonplace and taken for granted to some unreachable ideal which the entire world is striving towards. With this in mind, I wrote this work as an abstract reflection of the experiences I had in college and the existential and dystopian state of the world which I found myself living in immediately after I left.

This work is dedicated to Jack Szulc-Donnell, who would always greet me with “welcome” every time I sat down to eat with him.