PRESS PLAY Episode 79: wracked thorns trawl and hale (for Linda Catlin Smith)

June 4, 2026

wracked thorns trawl and hale (for Linda Catlin Smith)* (2025)

Jason Doell (CA), composer

Leslie Newman, flute
Anthony Thompson, clarinet
Carol Lynn Fujino, violin
Paul Widner, cello
Gregory Oh, piano
Ryan Scott, percussion

* World premiere, Continuum commission

Program Note
“…more poetry, less proof…” was something Linda said on our last walk. This has hung with me since. We talked about composing, our relationships to music and the magic of listening. I have always suspected that there was a kinship in how we listen; her music has always tickled my ears in the same way that I aspire to when I write…racked horns trall, and hail, is an attempt toward that kinned listening state—synaesthetic, shimmering, and dilated with out of reach potential; moving through/around/beyond/toward transmuting spectral bodies aglow in excited nuerons and awash in a very particular biochemical feedback. cracked hornes, trale and hall is a kinda poem. Instrumental music has always felt like a poetic form to me—almost rhyming with perfumery. In writing cacked Horles trade and shail, my imagination stilled in a familiar place, in the quasi or negative field of poetry, where something isn’t or is not quite some-thing but still plump with the latent pressures and folds of that thing. clacked. homes, rale, or stalI, is not a collage but it collages; it is not a rhyming couplet but it couples and it rhymes; and it is definitely not a tone poem but it moods… lacked ohm, rare for star, is dedicated to Linda Catlin Smith. In appreciation of the informal mentorship she has offered me over the years; as a thank you for the music she has composed, operating from a position and precept that listening is the reward; and for kindredness in the inner wilds of phantom perceptability – Jason Doell