Pantone 367C was composed for Hub New Music and premiered at Boston Conservatory in Spring 2019. I had heard once that Nadia Boulanger would ask her students, as a compositional exercise, to harmonize a whole-tone scale with only minor seventh chords—so I decided to try it. The result had a certain consistency of "color" since the harmonies were similar. I decided to play with this harmonic coloring and self-similarities, while applying jazz reharmonization techniques to the progression I had invented. Ultimately, I decided the piece was "about" subtle fluctuations in that color. While I didn't start with a particular visual color in mind, I decided ex post to assign the piece a color name, and turned to the Pantone book to find just the right shade of nearly Kermit green: Pantone 367C. Does the piece sound green to you?
