Taking ‘Frühlingstraum’ from Schubert’s Winterreise as its starting point, Icebloom is a miniature that attempts to address some of the relationships detailed in the song’s text. Wilhelm Müller’s poem presents a vignette of absence, imagination and memory, and it is the relationship between absence and presence that is glanced at in Icebloom’s brief moments: liminal sounds vaguely outline the ghosts of Schubert’s piano, and skeletal remnants drift through the thin hissing of the wind.
Icebloom was originally written for the Metapraxis Ensemble’s Winterreise Project, was then workshopped by the Curious Chamber Players for reading sessions at the Impuls Academy 2013, Graz, Austria, before receiving its first performance by Longleash in New York.