Dream Vapors

Music can possess the power to take hold of our emotions, guiding us along an imagined journey that stirs our inner being, a concurrently unique and familiar experience. New York composer Rain Worthington writes music to captivate the listener, creating textural and lyrical worlds that are inhabited by various colors and tones. On DREAM VAPORS, her full-length solo debut on Navona Records, the composer offers a selection of her orchestral works, presenting intense dreams, intangible perceptions, and musically evocative elaborations.

Worthington’s orchestral works place opposing emotional states side-by-side, juxtaposing them to form vulnerable gestures of tension and harmony. Works like Shredding Glass – described by Scott Locke in the Journal of International Alliance for Women in Music, as providing “exquisite disintegration, mere glass filaments casting light in all directions, with an undercurrent of unresolved apprehension… The texture is transparent but luminous, reminiscent perhaps of the late works of Mahler” – address the acceptance of devastating events, overcoming them with steadfast courage and transcendence. Conveying the impressionistic logic of dreams and emotions, Worthington expresses fear and sadness, conviction and love sometimes within the same piece.

Works such as Fast Through Dark Winds and Tracing a Dream emphasize how the desolate and despairing can heighten the joyous and tranquil. Yet Still Night exemplifies the composer’s use of texture, dynamics, and phrasing to convey an emotion: “Worthington has achingly difficult things to say to us, and her use of chromaticism, especially downward chromatic movement, to convey anguish, is very effective” (MusicWeb International). Worthington depicts a reality in her music that is relatable, direct, and inviting, revealing an environment in which the stuff of dreams can come alive.