Music in the Afterglow: An Interview with Oliver Caplan

I tend to find music in the afterglow, when I’ve gone back home from nature and am still trying to savor the feeling.IntroductionI met Oliver Caplan during our first year at Dartmouth College amidst a silly but studious cadre of musical misfits. He played piccolo in the marching band, and I played French horn in the wind symphony. Sometimes I sat in the stands with the band and played kazoo, just for the company. The first things that struck me about Oliver were his irrepressible smile and infectious laugh. He worked at the local Ben & Jerry’s and always gave an extra-large scoop to friends.As Oliver began to devote himself more seriously to his work in musical composition, I was doing the same with poetry. Our shared love for hiking and the electric feeling of being intricately connected to the natural world around us was what birthed our first collaboration, Oliver’s setting of a poem of mine called “Origins.” “Fireflies astound the darkness,” I wrote, and the music—violin, viola, ce...