Every work on this album was written by someone whose door I can knock on. That is not a small thing. Most of the music I’ve spent my life learning reached me across editions and recordings, at a distance marked by decades or oceans. These seven works reached me through conversation: in offices down the hall, over coffee in McMinnville, in rehearsals with the composer sitting ten feet away holding a pencil.

The title comes from what I hear when these seven pieces land together. There’s rigor in this music: patterns that lock and unlock within precise rhythmic architecture. But there’s also something underneath it that’s less willing to be organized. Linfield University exists in the heart of the Willamette Valley, a verdant landscape where cultivation and wildness share a fence line. I’ve come to believe the music written here reflects that special confluence.

The musicians on this recording are faculty, students, and alumni. We don’t separate them in the credits, and we don’t separate them in rehearsal. An undergraduate sitting in a professional session, working a passage through with the composer in the room, learns something that can’t be taught another way. That’s why I founded this ensemble, and it remains the part of the work I’m proudest of.

This is a record of what has been made in this place, and what is being made here now. Recording it is how it survives.

Thank you for listening.