Bluegreen Ecstatic Grey is a musical metaphor for the process of uncovering, feeling, and healing latent grief. In the last years I have learned firsthand how a true love relationship can help one to uncover and heal painful feelings of grief that may have been hidden, missed, or ignored and that embracing one’s truthful self-expression is a part of and a reward for healing this grief.

Bluegreen Ecstatic Grey is approximately 20 minutes in duration and has two parts, the first running ‘attacca’ into the second. This structure reflects the guiding metaphor of the piece: part one expresses what life is like before the uncovering of repressed grief, as well as the process of uncovering, while part two expresses the process of feeling and healing this grief. To go a little deeper, in part one there is a feeling of attempting to live one's life in the shadow of latent grief — there is a pretense and an underlying uneasiness. The music reaches for happiness and peace, but it’s filled with uncertainty, self-consciousness, and anxiety that hangs on like static. Outbursts of misplaced frustration hint at the psyche’s fear of and unwillingness to engage with the pain of grief. The long build to the climax around 5 minutes in expresses the difficulty of tapping into this grief for the first time, after which point it is more easily accessed. In part two, all pretense is stripped away to allow grief and anger to be felt in their full weight. The change in instrumentation, from the full ensemble in part one to the extended piano solo writing in part two, enhances the metaphor — unfiltered and truthful expression, as if from the core of one’s being, is allowed to emerge.