Crossing

Many of Auznieks’s compositions are inspired by, and contextualized through, philosophy and poetry, drawn from a wide array of sources that include Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. And the title of Crossing is, not surprisingly, also rich in literary associations, referring to Harold Bloom’s invocation of Emerson in his discussion of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Snow Man.” It envisages a crossing into another state of mind, suggested and catalyzed by rhetorical (and, in this composition, musical) devices. “I hope Crossing can become a leap from the familiar physical world and how memory operates in it,” says Auznieks, “to some other imaginary, utopian, idealistic world.”

The work centers on motivic transformations that function as an analogy to Proustian notions of memory. “The same motifs are heard, re-heard, and misheard,” Auznieks points out. As Feldman once observed, “The whole lesson of Proust is not to look for experiences in the object, but within ourselves.” Auznieks aims for this work to similarly elicit a parallel experience within the listener.