strange bird – no longer navigating by a star (2023)
(for orchestra)

strange bird - no longer navigating by a star is the fourth composition of a cycle inspired by the poem "My heart lives in my chest" by Dorothy Molloy. She writes about loss and the feeling of being stranded in her own thoughts, like a directionless bird.

In this cycle, I have created musical spaces that echo Molloy's description of the "vast / empty sky of the chest" and the "cries that echo / from the distance". Later in the poem, Molloy describes "a strange fluttering bird" whose aimless circling is the source of the cries echoing in an "empty place". strange bird - no longer navigating by a star takes up the spaces developed in the earlier works in the cycle and introduces the movement of this bird, drifting from place to place without ever landing or finding its destination.