$100
Duration: 10 min.
Instrumentation: 4 Tenor and 4 Bass Voices
Commission/dedication: written for and commissioned by Constellation Men’s Ensemble (CME) for their 12th season program, "pouring from empty cups", as part of the 2025 Ear Taxi Music Festival, Chicago, IL
Text: "empty cup" uses the text from Crystal Jackson's poem, "Thoughts Fueled by Wine & Silence", published on Medium.com November 10, 2019.
Program Notes (About the Piece):
When Constellation Men’s Ensemble approached me to write a piece around the theme “pouring from empty cups,” I hesitated. The prospect of returning to write for such an impeccable group thrilled me—they gave me one of my first commissioning opportunities—but the theme felt heavy. It implied hopelessness, dread, exhaustion.
I consider myself to be quite optimistic, enthusiastic, worry-free—a person with a high tolerance for struggle and strife. The general hurdles life throws at you. Yet, when I reflected on what it means to "pour from an empty cup", I realized how often my own cup has been empty. Especially as of late, despite my best efforts to keep my head down and focus on my work (because that’s easier than dwelling on misery), the feeling of hopelessness and dread in the air is palpable.
I feel it too.
It's impossible to ignore.
The world feels like it's crumbling.
The walls are caving in.
I look around and see people who've had enough. People who've endured more pain, more struggle, more loss than I can imagine. They're vocal—and rightfully so. They're quiet—and rightfully so. Once you've said all there is to say, what else is there to say? They're shouting into the void, hoping to be seen and understood. They're drained. They've had it. They're at their wit's end and last drop. And here I am, trying to capture what that sounds like—or, in the way I prefer to approach music, what that feels like. Not the process of becoming drained, but the question of how we keep going once we already are. What happens once we've poured the last drop? What keeps us reaching for that empty cup to continue pouring from?
What's the point?
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For text, I trusted instinct. I thought of writers who've impacted me—poets, essayists, bloggers, authors. For years, I've been an avid reader on the blog site Medium.com, where Crystal Jackson was one of the first writers I gravitated toward. Her work—and that of the other talented Medium voices—sparked my own writing contributions there.
Jackson has an uncanny ability to articulate what we all feel but can't describe or name. After reconnecting with her on social media, I asked if she had any writing that touched on this theme. She sent me several pieces, including the one that became this work: a poem entitled "Thoughts Fueled by Wine & Silence." The poem is vivid, raw, dark, dreadful—a descent into the psyche of someone consumed by despair.
The first stanza struck me immediately:
"It's not in my nature
to allow sadness to take me,
to make room for loneliness,
or to give space to anguish."
That really hits home for someone who doesn't dwell on dark thoughts. Even when I'm miserable, I push forward, close it off, refuse to admit it. It's not in my nature.
But the poem digs deeper into emptiness, ending with this haunting image:
"I feel that shoulder blade itch of fear
that the coming years will only be more of the same."
To me, "pouring from an empty cup" is about this eternal tension between mere hope and utter doubt, with the faintest thread of maybe—and holding onto that maybe as long as we can.
I don't know if I captured what I set out to do. I wanted to write a piece that feels like that darkness and despair—shot through with moments of catharsis, longing, and yearning for something to fill us up again.
A cry for hope, even when the cup is empty.
Press:
https://www.constellationensemble.org/home/season/empty-cups/