Program Notes
One Foot After The Other
Levi Taylor
Approximate performance time is 2 minutes
In the Composer’s Words
One Foot After The Other was first conceived through a cinematic lens before being expanded and reshaped for the concert hall. It is a meditation on endurance, will, and the sobering determination required to continue moving through grief and uncertainty when there is no clear sense of what lies ahead.
I began writing the work during a profoundly difficult period in my life. My father had recently died from COVID-19, and I found myself trying to sustain an overextended work schedule while joining my family and community in navigating the aftermath of our loss. The pandemic also brought into painful focus the ways racial inequities can become more visible — and more devastating — in moments of collective crisis. Those experiences informed the music’s emotional world through moments of weariness, mourning, urgency, and ultimately an insistence to carry on forward no matter the odds.
The piece opens in an unsettled atmosphere, almost like a distant alarm emerging from the dark. A sense of foreboding gradually takes shape before the central melody, mournful and exposed, appears in the solo cello. The lower strings then begin to establish the work’s central rhythmic impulse of a weighted, persistent motif meant to evoke the physical and emotional act of placing one foot after the other.
As that motif gathers momentum, the melody returns with greater urgency, joined by a wider instrumental voice. Just as much as the piece acknowledges the tiresome effort it takes to keep moving in times of hardship, it also passionately explores what becomes possible because of movement. Here the piece rises towards hope and courage, and even audacity where sometimes all you have to walk on is faith.
The work concludes in a contemplative space with footsteps receding toward an unknowable distance.
Performances
Agenda
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Fri, Oct 9, 20267:30 PMBelk Theater, Charlotte
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Sat, Oct 10, 20267:30 PMBelk Theater, Charlotte
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