During the Guggenheim Fellowship period, I wrote a large-scale musical composition based on Baruch Spinoza's philosophical work Ethica. Exploring concepts of “space and place,” the composition deals with questions of one’s place in the global world and how music informs and influences our perception of our place in this world. Looking at musical creation as an analogy to the movement of the immigrant, who discovers, remembers, forgets and rediscovers places on his voyage, the composition investigates relationships to space: historical space, space of immigration and disembodied space.