In the Fall of 2015 I wrote a solo piano piece for Sarah Cahill titled “track”. That work was inspired by this quote often credited to Henry David Thoreau: “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

When granted the opportunity to write a work for Adam Cockerham this text still lingered in my mind. I have since discovered that my book had misattributed the text to Thoreau when in fact it was written by Wilfred Arlan Peterson who was rehashing a concept he claims to have gotten from Thoreau’s “Walden”. While this new theorbo work shares some features of the piano piece written for Sarah Cahill, it may be more appropriate to do my own paraphrase of Luciano Berio. “The completed work is the ritual and commentary of other works preceding it, of more works that will follow. The question does not provoke a response but rather commentary and new questions”.