Ice, Eden was conceived and composed in the fall of 2000 from the composer’s fascination with two lines from a poem by Paul Celan from which the piece takes its title:

Before this hour has ended
ice will rise from the dead.

Musically, the piece does not try to recreate the implications of these lines, but rather is a study in coordination and non-coordination between the two players. In this process, much of the timbral spectrum produced by the piccolo and flute is explored in order to examine adjectives that could be applied both to the sounds produced by these instruments and to the structures produced by ice such as cold, sharp, hollow, brittle, and transparent.

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