Daily walks on the beach during his summer retreats to North Topsail Beach, one of the long string of islands off the coast of North Carolina, provided the serendipitous inspiration for Laroussini’s composition Ocean Cycles. Exploring the relationship between the ocean and moon, this work contains many cycles including a foundational pattern of seventeen notes that return throughout the work, and it is typified by sonic high and low points representing “tides” of music. A composition of nuanced impressions, Laroussini moves away from traditional musical formality and audience expectation toward the experiential and experimental, evoking the very feeling of standing in the ocean surrounded by the rhythmic, hypnotic power of waves: “My work is a representation of my own experience with nature…. Ocean Tides is very slow, immersive, and patient” permitting listeners to become fully encapsulated in the music, like the tide cycles of the mid-Atlantic.
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, and composition student at the Eastman School of Music, Marc Laroussini has studied composition with Robert Aldridge and David Dzubay, among others. He currently attends California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, CA.