In late October of 2019, a few friends and I drove an hour from our hometown of Lawrence, Kansas to take in the grain silos and abandoned cement plant in the ghost town of Mildred, KS. Inside of a cement drum, my friend Stella made use of the structure's natural resonance to spread the contagious earworm with which she had become afflicted after a long day of nannying: John Walter Bratton's "The Teddy Bears' Picnic". The piece that follows is the result of nearly three years' worth of attempts to encapsulate what "The Teddy Bears' Picnic" has come to mean to me since moving to New York. There are numerous quotations and transformations of the tune, though the motivic material of primary importance is not consciously related to the tune itself but rather represents figures associated with the memory.

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Commissioned by Pavlina Dokovska for the Mannes Sounds Festival's "Imagining Faust" concert. Performed by Vashawn Arora (Oboe), Adie Baban (Violin), Hannah Sohn (Cello), & Gyorgy Lekov (Piano) in April 2023.

Rather than programmatically following the sequence of events in Marguerite's story in J.W. Goethe's Faust, I have chosen to depict the struggle between her deep moral conscience and the overwhelming guilt and despair that consumes her. Consequently, the motivic material and structure are not meant to represent the different characters in her story but rather are symbolic representations of the forces of innocence and suffering, whose conflict shows the ease with which purity can be corrupted by the darker forces of the world. Whereas Faust seeks knowledge and experience at any cost, The Tragedy of Marguerite is meant as a reminder of the human toll of such pursuits.