Home is a Moment

for woodwind quintet

This piece is inspired by a quote from American author Kurt Vonnegut that I heard in John Green’s podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed. In an interview toward the end of his life, Vonnegut said:

 “I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized it’s not Mars or someplace like that. It’s Indinapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father, and uncles and aunts, and there is no way I can get there again.”

We all have a moment in our memories that we most associate with a feeling of being home. Its presence can cause emotional attachment to certain geographical places, but the true weight is in the moment itself which cannot be replicated. People pass on; situations change. No two days are alike. 

That said, there is always hope that new people will come into our lives who, once knowing them, we’ll wonder how we lived so long without them. There are moments of home to be experienced in the future that couldn’t have existed alongside the past moments we hold dear. This piece is about both omnipresent yearning for past times to return and hope that the future promises us more than returning to the past could ever give.

“Home is a Moment” is perhaps the my first piece in an unintentional series, followed by “All Safe. Home Gone” (2024) and “Visioning on the vacant air” (2025). All these works are programmatic in a contemplative rather than strictly narrative sense. Instead of portraying an unfolding plot, they function more like inner monologues as I try to wrap my head around a philosophical problem or question that’s fascinated me.

• Matthew Thomas Brown