The album In the Waiting Room represents an attempt to use the traditional artistic practice of tone poems as a medium for knowledge mobilization for other complex, abstract ideas in science (molecular phase change), socio economics (the South African system of Apartheid), healthcare (breast cancer), and loss (the sudden death of a friend). In the Waiting Room (Track 1) and The Time We Could Have Lost (Track 5) are a pair of tone poems that came to us unexpectedly in the winter of 2022 as a kind of artistic release from the grief that we experienced that year. In June of 2022, on the same day that one of our best friends died unexpectedly, Christina was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer. In the Waiting Room is an attempt to put into sound the emotional turmoil, fear, love, and almost hallucinogenic shared experience we had during her seven-hour surgery. Beginning with an internal scream, In the Waiting Room constantly sways from hope and love to anxiety and fear of losing a loved one in a stream-of-consciousness structure built from the uncontrolled emotional mess of that day. The Time We Could Have Lost is the second part of this journey. More reflective than In the Waiting Room, The Time We Could Have Lost is our love letter to each other, a grief-formed thankfulness that we still have each other. Our own abstract fear of losing each other was made real by the loss of our friend, and this composition is the bloom of gratitude and love that only comes from the depths of shared grief. In between these two compositions is a piece that represents the time it took to get from one to the other. Solid Liquid Gas is a musical expression of scientific phase change, when particles transition from one state of matter to another. Through this tone poem, audiences will experience a sonic narrative of a group of particles going from absolute zero to 55,000 degrees Kelvin, starting with the eerie super- symmetric quantum choreography of Bose-Einstein Condensates, to the vibrational potential energy of solid crystalline structures, the flow of liquid atoms, the Brownian motion of gas particles, and finally to the electrical conductivity of an ionization wave of plasma. These states of phase change happen in three movements: the shimmering and static first movement Solid; the powerful crashing waves of the second movement Liquid; and the chaotic grooves of the third movement Gas. The motivic engine that forms the basis of the harmonic and melodic content is inspired by the scientific idea of entropy, where all heat-based structures will gradually decline into disorder, while the structure and orchestration are inspired by the architecture of different states of matter and periods of phase change. In the context of this album, this tone poem represents the emotional detachment of continued life amid grief – despite our losses and fears, our molecules continued moving and changing. Finally, the album ends with Mirror Sermon, an homage to South African poet and anti-Apartheid hero Dennis Brutus, whose collection of poems Sirens, Knuckles, Boots achieved through poetry what we are attempting in this album to achieve through music. When I first read Dennis Brutus’s poetry in the early 2000s, it was the first time that the until-that-time abstract-to-me wrongness of Apartheid was made personal, emotional, visceral, and real. While the setting is purposely imperfect (for example, there are no actual gavottes or arabesques, and the sarabande occurs in the wrong place) the structure of the quartet is intimately tied to the poem. The “cold reflection” and “interlocking nudity” of the unaccompanied viola and cello at the beginning, the cavorting in “graceless dance” of the violin line that is eventually taken over by the whole orchestra, the “twitching strings of lust” in the violin cadenza, the “flat-two dimensional” sarabande that unfolds at measure 140, the “grotesque”, dance of the septuplet violin line that is a broken repetition of the violin cadenza, the second cadenza’s pale remembrance of the earlier motifs, and the finale’s “macabre dance of death” are all directly influenced by the poem. Since the poem is based on a reflection that is slowly revealed to be more and more horrifying and changed, everything in the composition is based on the initial motif presented by the viola. All four compositions were performed by the Onyx Lane Chamber Orchestra, a group of our dearest friends and favorite string players from Canada, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and California. Solid Liquid Gas and Mirror Sermon were both conducted by our dear friend and incredibly talented maestro and pedagogue Jeffery Grogan. I cannot think of a greater champion for music’s future. Thank you also to Canada Council for the Arts, who funded and made this artistic experience possible. In the Waiting Room and The Time We Could Have Lost were conducted by Christina Giacona while she was still recovering from surgery and wearing a full upper body-binder. The majority of In the Waiting Room is taken from our second read-through of the piece, which occurred immediately after Christina explained the composition and shared her cancer diagnosis with our musical family, who until this point were unaware of what she had been going through for the past year. The incredible performance that immediately followed was a cathartic musical experience unlike any I had ever felt before, as if every musician channeled their love, support, and hope directly into musical expression. Cover Image and BTS Photos by Dylan Johnson (@giantclick)