Til Tomorrow

This piece was commissioned by and is dedicated to Mauricio Castillo. This piece came to me at the time of a great emotional outpour. I was trying to move on from my past, but I always felt trapped by it. Subject to its torment and horrors. This piece reflects this idea of moving on, this seemed fitting for Mauricio’s solo as the premiere was his Senior Recital. This was written for Mauricio at a point where he was about to take a step into a new ground and a new place. Til Tomorrow was partially inspired by a Black folk song titled Black is the Color. This song was introduced to me by Matthew Maslanka during one of our meetings. He described to me its presence in his father’s Child’s Garden of Dreams as this point of pushing past the gates of the unknown. To me this folk song had a sort of desperate sound world to it. It clung to me in a way that felt fitting for this work. It has this energy that demands for resolution and forward motion and reappears throughout the piece in both obvious and not so obvious ways to signal this idea of moving on. A lot of my recent music has been about my past and coming to grips with it through music. This was my first step in reaching beyond that point. Much of my music is a story that unfolds itself through a timed course. Whether people come to the same conclusion of what that story is isn’t important. The point is that it hopefully pushes an audience past a point of comfortability so that one can start to make real change. Til Tomorrow is very much in line with a lot of my music. It is deeply rooted in the idea of the past and moving forward from it. The constant tensions in the piece are the strings of the past. It forced me to ask, can one truly move on? I came to the conclusion that eventually one can move on when pushed by some outside force. One must move on in order to better their own future. Daniel Perzan (2025)