The germinal idea for Broken Reef came from an unfinished sketch in one of my composition journals. I had drafted a few phrases for solo piano several years ago, but never developed the music further. One of the shorthand harmonies in the sketch was a double polychord: Eb/Gb/Ab. This caught my attention, and eventually developed into the harmonic language of Broken Reef.
Alongside the musical construction of this piece came its conceptual development. The first phrases conjured the image of an underwater scene, and after some consideration, I felt that the harmonic language and motivic material were evocative of the plight of coral reef bleaching. The music is sometimes shimmering, contemplative, and colorful, and at other times tense, pale, and desolate. This parallels the state of many reefs worldwide: often called the “rainforests of the sea” on account of the biodiversity they foster, reefs are beautiful and teeming with life when healthy, but as the effects of the climate crisis cause environmental stress, they fade and die. This death causes a ripple effect across oceanic ecosystems. My aim in the development of this piece was to blend the contrast of beauty and death into a unified sonic space to represent the tenuous survival chances the reefs face, and further, what this means for the biodiversity of the oceans.

The recordings on this page feature Er-Husan Li, who premiered the work and has brought it so much life.