A “behind the scenes” listen to an unedited segment of me composing. I’m working on my chamber music piece “2312 Suite”. The instrumentation is flute and contrabassoon to be further accompanied by piano, string quartet and percussion.The piece is based on this wild sci-fi novel I recently read by Kim Stanley Robinson called 2312. The piece is in it’s early stages, and what I’m working on here is themes for the two main characters. The first is a woman from Mercury named Swan. She’s an artist and she has a quantum computer named Pauline embedded in her neck. She’s also a hermaphrodite and has a bird brain and a cat brain implanted in her own brain. She purrs like a cat, and sings like a bird, hence the bird-like motives (and a little purr) in her theme. The theme also quotes the first few notes of “le Cygne” (“The Swan”) by Camille Saint-Saëns. The other character is a man from Saturn’s moon of Titan named Wahram. He’s a really big rotund dude and his voice is super low, hence the choice of contrabassoon to represent his character. Wahram really loves Beethoven and he often sings or hums the composer’s pieces to himself. He particularly likes the Grosse Fugue (“Grande Fugue”) and Symphony no. 3, the “Eroica” (“heroic”) symphony. (Beethoven admired the ideals of the French Revolution, so he dedicated the third symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte… until Napoleon declared himself emperor. It is said that Beethoven then sprung into a rage, ripped the front page from his manuscript and scrubbed out Napoleon's name!) So, I’ve incorporated motifs from these two pieces into Wahram’s theme. In this recording I am playing around with Swan’s and Wahram’s themes, transforming them with the simple processes of transposition (raising or lowering the pitch, inversion (upside down), retrograde (backwards), and retrograde inversion (backwards and upside down). There is experimentation with superimposing the two themes, and weaving them together in alternating phrases. Development of small motives from Swan’s theme can be heard as well. Stay tuned for more as the piece evolves...

---

Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/spacetomcontinuum/support