Will to Power
Orchestra / 10' / Difficulty — Really Hard / 2026
Program Notes
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?..." Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed these words in the late 19th century, during a period when Europe was increasingly questioning religion's moral authority.
For Nietzsche, the "death of God" marked the collapse of religion as the foundation of moral values in society—a crisis of meaning.
I imagine this crisis of meaning in a musical context: a jazz band. Just as a society loses its moral authority, a jazz band loses its common time. What is left is a group of wild, improvisatory voices competing to establish common time over one another.
One can also make a different interpretation, however: this jazz band can also be seen as a single individual who contains competing drives, each with its own will to power. Emerging from beneath these arguments is a hymn, which eventually washes over all of these improvisatory voices—representing self-mastery.