Orchestration

for voice, electric guitar, vibraphone, and electronics

Duration

5 minutes

Commissioned By/Premiere

Canto Selah was commissioned by The Living Show, who premiered the work along with Tanner Porter, voice, on January 30th, 2026 in San Francisco.

Score

This score is in exclusivity until January 2027.

Notes

Canto Selah takes its name and inspiration from a poem by my friend G.C. Waldrep, written for the poet Karen An-hwei Lee. At the heart of Waldrep’s poem is a haunting image: a mirror that “repeats its only curse, which is Son. Son. Son. Son.” For this project, Legacies, that image spoke profoundly to me—the way a mirror can become a kind of trap, endlessly reflecting and refracting identity, memory, and voice.

The piece is built entirely around the concept of mirrors and mirroring. The vocalist engages in a dialogue with pre-recorded versions of herself, creating a conversation that splinters and multiplies across the sonic space—a kind of vocal counterpoint where the self talks to itself, questions itself, answers itself. The vibraphone and guitar extend this concept through cascading delays, each instrument playing with mirrored reflections and refractions of its own sound. What emerges is a work suspended between presence and echo, between the voice that speaks now and the voice that has already spoken, caught in the endless repetition of the mirror’s curse.