Two Steps Forward

Justin Morell says: “This is about the early struggles we had with language and how we worked so hard to make progress only to see that progress vanish. It often felt like we were taking two steps forward and one step back.Early on Loren had some speech, but he struggled, and eventually lost it—we worked hard and occasionally seemed to make progress but the incremental gains in language never held.”

Variation 2 opens with rhythmic figures that depict the movement title. The first two short chords are the two (descending) steps. After a brief pause, the same two chords are repeated—again, two steps—but a third chord is added in the reverse direction—a step back. The melody develops the main motive from Loren’s theme on all scale degrees, and in counterpoint with different groupings of the orchestra. The trumpet improvises between statements of the melody over open vamps, and over a lengthy coda in dialog with short splashes of color and texture from the orchestra and choir. This movement features a consistent compound-meter groove from the rhythm section, but also requires careful balance of timbres to create the brief ethereal moments.

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