Joshua Hey is a composer living in Philadelphia whose work has been performed by the Daedalus Quartet, ICE, Dal Niente, PRISM, Quatuor Bozzini, and soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain. His music has been presented at IRCAM-Manifeste, Nokia Bell Labs, Time of Music, reMusik’s St. Petersburg Music Festival, and the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. He is the winner of a Barlow Commission, the Martirano Award, and residencies at Copland House and Yaddo. In 2014-15, he was a visiting scholar at the Sibelius Academy with a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.

About the work

afterimage is comprised of four short movements, each played attacca to form a continuous whole. The piece is formed and shaped by vertical lines of resonant harmony and horizontal lines of glissandi. These intersections convey a sculptural quality, further emphasized by its trajectory in time. Embedded in a seemingly undifferentiated, found material-the glissando-little melodies are gradually carved out. In attempting to uncover these potential energies, motifs loop back on themselves, crumbling, becoming stuck, obscured, or veer off in odd directions. Given enough time and repetition, these motifs may be heard in or behind other materials, even after they themselves disappear.