Drowned in Light: II. Nightswimming by Jens Ibsen

Performed by the New World Symphony on March 23rd, 2024
Conducted by Edwin Outwater

All artists have obsessions, and some obsessions are life-long. A few of my own have been classical-era musical forms like sonata and rondo form, modern pop song structures, bass-driven grooves, polyrhythm, and vernacular musical styles—in short, chasing after the sweet spot of what’s catchy and complex. This piece incorporates all of these elements; it is a concise distillation of my musical philosophy and my feelings about the San Francisco Bay Area, my home.

The title of the piece and its first movement is both an allusion to one of my favorite Rolo Tomassi tracks, A Flood of Light, and also from how the music appeared to me in my mind; I have various forms of synesthesia, so the imagery associated with the themes came to me like bright, overwhelming light. Musical material often comes to me spontaneously, I do much of my writing in my head and developed most of the first movement of this piece this way. At the time I was listening to a lot of Rolo Tomassi, a UK-based band that blends shoegaze and hardcore to make music that is both sensitive and exhilarating. I knew that to channel these hardcore sounds, I needed the proper instrumentation. I’ve written several pieces for acoustic instruments imitating electric ones, but this piece I knew I had to have the real thing. As a result, the first movement is very electric guitar-forward, almost like a concerto. Structurally, it has a song-like form with a refrain introduced in the slow introduction that gradually is developed and expanded over the course of the piece, with various episodes foregrounding either the guitar or the ensemble. Drumming is integral to this style of music, so naturally there is a prominent drum set part as well.

The second movement is much more sedate. The mental picture I have of the music contains deep hues of the night sky, hence the title Nightswimming. After being drowned in light, the listener comes up from the depths into a beautiful, azure evening. I wanted this piece to be imbued with the softer side of shoegaze and surf rock, giving it a nostalgic, yearning feeling. My many years of sunlit days and moonlit evenings growing up in the Bay have coalesced into the sounds of this work, my poem to the place I call home.