The idea for Swell Lines comes from music’s ability to be perceived as a tangible, physical form – a mountain, a river, a winding road – and its capacity to capture the feeling or essence of a place.  As a child, I loved to watch the ocean birds from high atop Kauaʻiʻs Kīlauea Point, and Swell Lines is essentially a portrait of that place and time, with marching ocean swells, shifting currents below, and sea birds soaring high above.

Swell Lines for string orchestra was written for Jonas Carlson and the Punahou Symphony in celebration of Punahou School’s 175th anniversary. The work is derived from the third movement of deep sea, distant sky (String Quartet No. 1), which was commissioned by Chamber Music Hawaii’s Galliard String Quartet with support from the Honolulu Mayor’s Office on Culture and the Arts and premiered in April 2015.