5 players: clarinet and percussion quartet - Tangled Landscape

Ensemble: clarinet in Bb, percussion quartet

Duration: 21 minutes

Commissioned by: Seunghee Lee

Premiere: TBA

Note:

As a kid, I had an illustrated anthology of Greek mythology that I consulted like a Bible. I especially loved the monsters: the witch Circe who turns men to pigs; the cyclops Polyphemus, blinded by Odysseus’s trickery; the Sirens, cursed to sing a song so beautiful it brings death. At bathtime, my Dad and I would make little ships out of toilet paper and watch them swirl down the whirlpooling drain, imagining it was Charybdis’s mouth.

I sympathized with these creatures: the same characteristics that made them monstrous made them relatable. Who among us has never loved and hated a person in equal measure, as Circe does towards Odysseus? Or felt as lonely as Medusa, whose gaze turns men to stone?

On a recent trip to Greece I revisited The Odyssey. It was funny and strange to map the mythic worlds of my childhood against their real-life counterparts: picture the Sirens on a beach of sunburned tourists, or Scylla picking off hungover spring breakers. It struck me that there is something musical in the interval separating reality and myth. Where else do we turn but music, to feel like our everyday dramas are as big as the gods? I wanted to write a piece that wedged itself into this interval like Scylla in her cave, existing in two worlds at once; thorny as everyday life yet archetypally vast.

This suite for clarinet and percussion quartet, written shortly after that trip, conjures six of these landscapes as I remember them: caves, coastlines, mountains, ruins. As with any myth, the listener is invited to fill in the details; to map their own journey across this world, where ordinary life carries the weight of myth, and even a monster can have its heart broken.