“The Whole Sea In Motion” sets a prose text from Agnes Grey, a 1907 novel by British author Anne Bronte. In choosing this text to set, the composer was struck by the first sentence, which begins “Nolanguage can describe [...] the sky and ocean” and then proceeds to do just that, detailing the narrator's experience of the ocean in a vivid, keen language. Within the musical setting of the text, the ocean is representedalternately in the ebbing and flowing of the alea...