This piece may be performed with piano in place of harp.

“I have always held a deep love for the pacific northwest. The Opal Sea serves as my musical love letter to this gorgeous region. Ella Higginson was a pacific northwest based poet around the turn of the 20th century, and upon finding this beautiful sonnet she wrote about the Salish Sea in Washington, I immediately knew that I wanted to use it. I constructed this piece as something of a call and response between the poet and the nature that she describes.
The harp (or piano) repeats variations on the same motive with small elaborations each time, as one looking out over the scene of the sea would see the same image, but notice something small and new each time. In response to these images, the choral response echoes the romantic artistic philosophy that it will always be the objective of art to effectively capture the beauty of nature, and it will always be the fate of art to fail. The choral sections imitate elements of the primary theme, but with small alterations that separate them sonically, then as the poetry takes hold, the music diverges to a greater degree, bringing each new observation to the fore in a series of small complications. While each new poetic thought is beautiful in its own right, it remains tonally distinct from the purity of the nature it seeks to describe.”