D a v i d   V e s s

The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, meaning to return home and algos, for pain. While the word has softened over time into something like fond remembrance, this piece leans into its original, bittersweet weight: the ache of knowing you cannot truly return, not to the way things were, not to the way you remember them. At the heart of 'My Home, Over Yonder' is a melody that began its life elsewhere. It was originally written as part of a score to a video game that I wrote music for during my doctoral degree. The melody was to evoke the feeling of calm, as it played only when the avatar was in their homeroom, safe and sound. Its character draws from the town themes of childhood favorites like Pokémon and Final Fantasy: warm, simple, sheltering. Here, that melody is reborn for the trio, first heard in a timid but evolving E♭ rendition, before growing into a fuller, more emphatic statement in F. It is (mostly) in the Mixolydian mode, which carries an inherent harmonic restlessness, an unsettled quality that keeps the melody from ever feeling fully at ease, mirroring the wandering spirit of the work. That restlessness shapes the whole of the work’s design. The piece is built on a circular structure with an ever-ascending harmonic scheme, always stepping forward, always searching for a tonal home it cannot quite reach. It opens with a call: the sound of adventure, of setting out. From there, the music is in constant motion, forward and upward. And yet, much like it begins, the work closes by returning to that opening material, not as triumph, but as reckoning. There is no homecoming here. Instead, there is the quiet realization that home may be a place we can never truly return to. We are forever searching for and reaching back to - 'My Home, Over Yonder'.