Journey to Danbury was inspired by the music of Charles Ives and my childhood fascination with finding, collecting, and learning everything possible about rocks and minerals, including the collector’s prize Danburite.

Danburite, a rare, highly durable, calcium boron silicate mineral, used as a highly-sought-after, specialty gemstone due to its brilliant and glassy luster that rivals topaz, was discovered in 1839 by Charles Upham Shepherd in Danbury, Connecticut. Danburite, that has been mined from Danbury, is exceedingly rare because the city of Danbury built over the originally-found deposit of it. Modern pieces are sourced today from locations such as Mexico, Myanmar, and New York. Finding a piece of Danburite from Danbury is a collector’s dream-come-true.

My personal Journey to Danbury began when I was five years old, when I became enamored with rocks and minerals. By age seven, I wanted to spend all of my spare time at museums, rock and mineral shows, rock and mineral dealers, excavation sites, and libraries learning more. Later, I participated in a dig in Connecticut and discovered that Connecticut is a state full of mineralogical history, resources, and sites, helping to fuel a lifelong interest that also led to me meeting a lot of interesting people. I am continually fascinated by how minerals are formed, their unusual structures, their beautiful or strange qualities that seem like nature’s art, which for me parallels the uniqueness of music.

The music of Charles Ives is like a rare gem, forged in a fire of fierce creativity, it exudes a magical mix of influences: European traditions and American folk songs and hymns. Charles Ives brought forth a new, experimental sound like nothing that came before. As an homage to Ive’s complex creations, my percussion piece incorporates polytonality, polyrhythms, and dissonance. Like Ives, my current body of work has often been inspired by folk music, hymns, the human voice, art, nature, literature, and poetry, as well as finding resonance with the everyday experiences of life in America, in all of its ups and downs.

Journey to Danbury also references my early childhood, which was filled with creativity, improvisation on a wide variety of musical instruments, the freedom to follow my interests deeply, and the encouragement to express my imagination through play. In Journey to Danbury, I sought to weave a tapestry of sound, a journey through childhood memories and dreams, and an immersion into a musical representation of my fascination with all things unique, odd, strange, beautiful, and compelling.

The music of Journey to Danbury is at play. Like the play of children, which often includes references to the adult world around them, my musical representation of play mimics the working world through sounds of digging, mining, discovering, and trains journeying to unknown places. Traveling through the quickly changing states of consciousness of a young child living in a twilight world of the imagination, the music shifts in the middle section from the regular rhythmical mining and digging sounds of high activity to an otherworldly, slightly eerie, dream-like state. The music returns back to the original theme and mood, ending with an imaginary train drifting away, journeying on to the Danbury of my childhood dreams.

Notes copyright Theodore Tavi Hein 2026, All Rights Reserved