The use of descansos is a tradition that comes from Spanish culture.  Traditionally, descansos were used to mark the place where weary pallbearers would set a coffin down in a funeral procession traveling on foot to the cemetery.  Often a stone marker, flowers, or a cross, this marker was known as a descanso.  In the United States, this was inherited and used as a way to mark of deaths of settlers moving west as a result of violent conflicts with Native American tribes.  In this case, future settlers would often stop there to reflect and pray.  This tradition continues in modern times in the form of highway crosses, marking the sites of fatal accidents. 

This for me struck a personal note as I have lost friends to such accidents, the descansos for whom I drive past whenever I am back in my hometown in New Jersey.  Since their deaths, I have wanted to make some sort of an offering to their memory.  Not wanting to write some large overblown emotional work, I have chosen to write a series of works based upon the idea of the descanso, a sonic space for reflection. Although the first work, descanso (after omega) was specifically related to the loss of friends, the current work, descanso (waiting)  is more specifically about waiting to hear news of a loved one’s fate.

In December of 2004, as most are aware, a Tsunami hit central Asia.  A friend of mine happened to be visiting her father in Sri Lanka at the time.  For quite a while her friends in the US had no way of contacting her.  Although she turned out to be fine, I began to reflect on the feeling of potential loss.  That feeling of waiting when you don’t know exactly what has happened to a loved one, and, specifically, the moment where you realize that they may, in fact, be dead. 

 This work is not an elegy for New York City, Sri Lanka, or anywhere else, but rather a reflection on waiting for potentially devastating news.   Lasting approximately 10 minutes, Descanso (waiting) was written for eighth blackbird, and was premiered by them on May 15^th, 2005 at Princeton University.