Hot Shop

David Lockington, Principal Artistic Partner of the Northwest Sinfonietta, invited me to write a piece for the April 2017 collaboration with the Tacoma Museum of Glass, a program titled “Art for Art’s Sake”. It was an exciting prospect, because I’d spent a lot of time in the hot shop watching my sons learn to blow and shape glass when they were teenagers. There’s an energy to the glass workshop, and of course, a profound heat: the glass is heated to 2100 degrees! Working in pairs, and sometimes trios, the glass is shaped during the short amount of time it’s workable. A tremendous collaborative rhythm gets set up: the first part of the piece is a tribute to group pulse and cooperatively generated polyrhythm. I kept dreaming and thinking about a musician I worked with over several decades, Obo Addy, a Ghanaian master drummer who immigrated to the US in the 70s and lived out his years in the Pacific Northwest. I learned about the circular nature of rhythm from him, and the dreams of him and thoughts of my sons in the hot shop comingle in the first section of the piece. The slower section is a meditation on the cooling process of glass pieces, called annealing, which is simultaneously boring and treacherous. If cooled too rapidly, the work could shatter, so the team must take pains to treat the newly birthed art glass like an egg, and wait to see how it will fare. In 2019, I was asked to extend the piece - initially I was going to write the last section about refraction, but then my lovely mom died (peacefully, after a long and wonderful life), and I visited the Tacoma Museum of Glass again to reconnect to the project. Most of the exhibits were closed that day, so my attention was drawn to the Native American exhibit, and specifically a basket of woven glass with a thunderbird in its center. Something about it just floored me, so the new section became about weaving and the long, proud tradition of the thunderbird, a powerful symbol that shows up  in many cultures. A music video created in partnership with the Northwest Sinfonietta and the Tacoma MOG’s videographer Derek Klein was premiered in October 2020.