"To Touch The Forever" is a piece I wrote my sophomore year of college when faced with the task of writing a piece using set theory.
The title is inspired by lyrics from Queen's "Who Wants To Live Forever." I wanted to create a piece for vibraphone using somewhat unconventional techniques. This piece requires an incredible amount of coordination, particularly in the second half of the piece where the performers left hand is keeping an eighth note ostinato while the right hand cycles through patterns of eighth notes, triplets, and quintuplets.
This is one of my favorite pieces I've written and (as one of my earliest 'serious' compositions) is a piece that really progressed my love for composing.

This recording is titled the [proof_of_concept_demo] because I needed a way to have this piece played for my professor, but I a) did not have the time to learn the piece to perform it and b) did not want to use the Sibelius playback audio because this piece requires very distinct timbres not in the Sibelius sound library. I recorded this in a practice room at school in sections and mixed all of the takes together to get this recording. (I think you can hear someone singing or playing trombone in the background from an adjacent practice room.) Someday (hopefully) I'll record this piece for real or (more hopefully) get a recording of someone else who decided to play this piece!

Below is the text included with the score:

The rhythmic structure of To Touch The Forever is based on the title of the piece itself. I took the phrase “To Touch The Forever” and translated it into rhythm by assigning each consonant two eighth notes and each vowel a quarter note. This pattern outlines the initial rhythmic structure of the piece. To create the second rhythmic structure, I took the initial rhythm and put each quarter note or pair of eighth notes into groups of four. The phrase “To Touch The Forever” contains seventeen letters rather than sixteen, which would be much more easily divided by four. To incorporate this seventeenth beat, I kept cycling the seventeen beats into groups of four until I ended up with a complete group of four (shown in line 5). To create the second rhythmic motif, I isolated each unique group of four beats, and compressed them into the smallest possible rhythmic structure. This resulted in a eight beat rhythmic structure and is the rhythmic foundation for the rest of the piece.

The melodic structure of To Touch The Forever is based on the collection of notes in Forte Set 5-20 (which contains notes G, Ab, Bb, D, Eb). By adding and subtracting pitches to this set, as well as transposing the set, I was able to create all of the different sets found throughout To Touch The Forever.