Sorceress was written out of great love for a person no longer in my life—it is both a reflection of my feelings towards this person when I wrote it, as well as an emotional landscape unto itself. Upon completing the piece, I became overwhelmed with emotion and began sobbing—something I've seldom experienced with a piece of mine. I had written the piece fairly quickly, fueled by passion and excitement, but experiencing the work as a whole for the first time, even as its creator, was deeply humbling and vulnerable. I’d realized the depth of my honesty through the music and that reality both terrified and delighted me. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to feel such strong emotion, and for it to be conveyed in as authentic a manner as I could muster. If only every piece could come so easily.

This piece features bold, lyrical melodies, spooky, creeping passages, and even an unbridled metal breakdown in the central section. I endeavored to make the piece sound as “un-harp-like” as possible while still remaining idiomatic for the player. My goal was to evoke clean and distorted electric guitar sounds. To me, the piece concludes with a satisfying feeling of one’s spirit having arrived home—of course, with a bit of a sting at the very end. To recall Tavener’s Funeral Canticle, “What earthly sweetness remaineth unmixed with grief?”