Kiss Around the World was com­mis­sioned by New Works Cal­gary and the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts for Ensem­ble Res­o­nance. It is the sec­ond Around the World piece that I have writ­ten, tak­ing a sin­gle word—in this case kiss—and pre­sent­ing it in a wide vari­ety of languages.

The idea of kiss­ing takes on very dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and I wanted to find a con­no­ta­tion that was as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble. There­fore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nur­tur­ing kiss, the kiss a par­ent would give a child. This was the most uni­ver­sal use of kiss­ing I came across. Roman­tic kiss­ing, which is what I ini­tially thought would make the best focus, is not uni­ver­sal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Euro­peans; Kore­ans and Japan­ese actu­ally use a mod­i­fied form of the Eng­lish word for roman­tic kissing.

Musi­cally, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usu­ally one per word, that are arranged and devel­oped into a lyri­cal, flow­ing tex­ture. Being a com­poser obsessed with frag­men­ta­tion and con­trast, this was a novel and stim­u­lat­ing chal­lenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musi­cal mate­ri­als at hand. The result is a sooth­ing, gen­tle piece that has cer­tain aspects of a lul­laby, all the while employ­ing the collage/mosaic tech­niques that are the hall­marks of my style. There is even a lit­tle col­lage sur­prise at the end of the piece…