At the end, breathless and clothed in fire (2022)

flute/piccolo/bass flute, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, trombone, two percussion, harp, piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass

Commissioned by and written for Eric Dudley and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

At the end… is a summation, a culmination and re-contextualization of my instrumental work since 2012. When I began writing instrumental music, I wanted to create music that screamed, struck, scraped, tore, struggled. I drew from the Western tradition: 18th-century Sturm und Drang, 19th-century Romanticism, the tortured and angular shapes of post-war Modernism, its turn in mid-20th century Neue Subjektivität, the extroversion of punk rock as well as its attendant somberness, and the expansive inwardness of its consequence in post-punk genres of the 1980s—I threaded a narrative from my immigrant suburban adolescence through my post-doctoral career, using someone else’s toolbox and tried to make it my own. I dreamed of an affective experience that was as much an assault as it was a missive; a call from “inside the house, a stream of consciousness that was an attempt to reach anyone who would hear it and empathize with its “message”. It was an ambitious desire with various levels of success. But there were, at the least, moments of triumph in various work, moments that articulated in sound and form what I could not with words. I collected these moments, since 2012, and carried them with me into At the end…

Commissioned in 2021 by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and premiered at the ODC Dance Commons in April 2022, the title owes itself, in part, to a poem by José Garcia Villa, a Pilipino poet and immigrant who, like me, found himself drawn to and immersed in the culture and practice of Western Euro-American modernism. The first stanza of the poem reads:

In my desire to be Nude

I clothed myself in fire:—

Burned down my walls, my roof,

Burned all these down.

A consummate Catholic, Garcia Villa struggled with his relationship to God and the implications of Tradition amidst the constant thrust of scientific and social “progress”, the misguided ideal of mid-20th-century Whiteness rooted in the same 18th-century thinking that bore the musical influences I enumerated above and which employed/employs the inhumane practices of subjugative colonialism to continue is march into the 21st-century. I, and other artists, have inherited Garcia Villa’s struggle as victims and accomplices. The piece is also a liturgy of sorts. My grandfather and namesake, Amadeo Regucera, himself a Pilipino immigrant, died towards the end of the composition of At the end… and some formal aspects of the work owe themselves to the traditions of Catholicism: the antiphonal arrangement of the instrumental choirs, the processional music that begins the piece, the collage-like form that references the parody masses of the 16th-century, and the moments of exaltation that give way to passages of sober stillness and reflection.

The piece is structured in three sections. An introduction that invites the listener into the piece’s atmosphere ultimately hurtles into the first section, a re-orchestration of my 2016 work SKRWL (scored for clarinet, trombone, piano, viola, and cello and written for Ensemble Intercontemporain), is performed by the instrumental choir of strings, percussion, and piano. This section centers on a single performative gesture: the slow drawing of a string bow across a muted string. The ensemble develops upon this scraping timbre, and the music constantly expands and contracts, undulating forward.

A percussion reprise introduces the second section, performed by the instrumental choir of winds, percussion, and harp. This section is predominated by wind music that pushes the performers to the edge of their physical ability yet withholding one of the foundational elements of Western music: pitch. Instead, the texture foregrounds the fundamental aspect of the instrument itself: the breath of its performer. The texture is active, frantic, always on the verge of collapsing in on itself through sheer propulsion. In terms of my own work, this music has perhaps the most complex history. It began as a piccolo line (a rhythmic transcription of a poem by Ocean Vuong) from my ensemble piece for twelve musicians, Torso of Air | Stapled Flesh (written in 2017 for Ensemble Linea). The piccolo line became a solo piece for Bay Area flutist Stacey Pelinka as part of The trauma you keep safe is the pain you pass along (2018) then was re-orchestrated in the piece RAW (for the Eco Ensemble, 2019), and then appears here in At the end…, yet another re-orchestration and recontextualization of all the previous iterations of the piccolo line, nearly verbatim.

The final section, tutti, begins with music lifted from my 2012 string quartet, obscured-distorted-redacted, a pastiche of György Ligeti’s Second String Quartet among others, and thrusts the musicians into a prismatic, and often overwhelming complex of rhythmic and gestural interplay and emotive and musical desperation. The section’s climactic moment explodes eventually, its remnants falling like so much dust—a final lament scored for piano and harp.

My gratitude to Eric Dudley, Lisa Oman, and the musicians of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players for commissioning and premiering the piece, and to David Milnes and the Eco Ensemble, longtime friends and champions of my music, for re-presenting the work and excavating its emotional and musical details.

Excerpts from the premiere of At the end, breathless and clothed in fire at ODC Dance Commons in April 2022