An Ending, a Beginning

Where "We Move Lightly" is about process, this piece is about the moment of threshold itself. "An Ending, a Beginning" carries its title's paradox in its very structure — the piece feels like it might conclude several times before it actually does, and each false ending generates a small accumulation of meaning. The piano here is more deliberate than in O'Halloran's lighter work, each phrase weighted and considered, as if the music is choosing its words carefully. Strings enter and leave with economy, never staying long enough to settle into comfort. The harmonic language is quietly ambiguous — you're often not sure whether you're in resolution or suspension, and that uncertainty is the piece's central emotional content. This is music about standing at the edge of two chapters simultaneously, not yet free of one and not yet committed to the next. The production is intimate, the reverb suggesting a small room rather than a concert hall, which keeps the emotional scale personal rather than epic. O'Halloran wrote much of his most affecting work in the context of grief and transition, and this piece carries that origin without needing to announce it. You reach for it at genuine thresholds: the last night in a city you're leaving, the first morning after something ends, the specific suspended feeling of having chosen but not yet arrived. It holds that liminal state without trying to resolve it prematurely.