My works thus far have focused on darker, more painful human emotions. Pieces such as Recollections of Fear, Hope and Discontent, or On Sorrow, Anger and Reflection have been direct reactions to something that happened externally in my life. The symphony is the opposite. This is an expression of the kind of things I've wrestled with internally, but it's also a summation of sorts. I look at it as the end of a period of my music that's unrelenting, delving into the most painful and dark places of my psyche. There are violent and frenzied outbursts, sustained allegros, but also quite a big of reflective, slow and melancholy passages.

I perceive the symphony as a dense canvas, both in the complexity of the ideas and in the way those ideas build upon one another in layers. Within the first five minutes, four key musical building blocks are set forth: the opening chimes in a dissonant minor ninth; a pulsing of open fifths in the lower strings, rather like a funeral march; an elongated first theme; and a combination of the funeral march with a condensed version of the first theme stated by flute and first violins. Everything in the piece comes from those ideas, even the chorales that come later.

Written in single movement, the symphony consists of differentiated sections and transformations of the basic building blocks. A series of three emotional climaxes grows in intensity, each one seeming to obliterate the tension and the weight of the preceding one. The earlier climactic moments are no less important. There are three equally important peaks, the last a culmination. As it is at the end, it's a summation, thus more important structurally.

At the head of the score there is a quatrain by the Russian poet Ovsip Mandelstam:

With vaguely breathing leaves
The black wind rustles --
And a trembling swallow
Draws a circle in the dark sky...