The original concept for this piece was born in a place of odd associations. Around the beginning of my undergraduate studies, I began musing on a piece for wind band taking the three movement titles of Malcolm Arnolds’s Prelude, Siciliano, and Rondo and writing a suite using the same movement titles with different interpretations. The idea was shelved for years, evolving as it sat in the back of my mind. The middle movement, Siciliano, was the most difficult to attach a new sound to. The lilting 6/8 dance seemed too narrow an identity until I thought of another sound centuries and a continent away: the silky-smooth 6/8 backbeat of late 20th-century soul music. A love ballad combining the melancholy of the siciliano with the moodiness of soul music. The strange synthesis practically spilled out onto the page once I found it despite the original idea for the suite being changed beyond recognition.

Quiet Storm is a sub-genre of R&B music performed in a smooth, jazzy style with emotionally charged lyrics singing of romance found, sustained, or lost. Quiet Storm is named such in reverence to the artists I pay homage to, classics like Donny Hathaway and The Stylistics but also newer names like Alicia Keys and Daniel Caesar. Quiet Storm also evokes the raindrop-like texture of the mallet percussion at the beginning. The first section of the piece is a popular song form, complete with verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. The laid-back yet passionate tune in the tenor saxophone is supported by the characteristics rhythms of the siciliano. The piece has moments of tender intimacy next to explosive releases of love and lamentation. As the smoke clears after the final eruption of feelings, the light raindrops from the beginning return as the singer repeats the last line of the chorus.