Winged Fragments: A Dream of Six Swans
for two soprano saxophones, trombone, electric guitar, vibraphone, piano, conductor, live processing, and four-channel tape track
The Six Swans
Six brothers were turned into swans by an evil spell cast by their stepmother. The spell could only be broken if their sister would knit for six years six shirts of nettle in silence. After six years, it happened that the shirts were almost ready, all except the sixth, which was lacking an arm. She threw the shirts over the swans and her brothers were restored to human form. All were transformed except for the youngest that retained a swan’s wing instead of an arm where the shirt was unfinished. – Brothers Grimm
This piece is a strange one, all texture and blown feathers. It is a memory replaying, distorting sometimes upon repetition, with the desire for the final transformation, the moment when her brothers return. The sister obsessively knits. She becomes accustomed to the constant pain endured when one knits with stinging nettles and when one waits for the return of those they love. This is what I imagine to be her song, found while spending a week on the Deep Listening Retreat led by Heloise Gold, Ione and Pauline Oliveros. With the help of fellow deep listener, Lesley Greco, the composition began with simple movements and listening to my body. I have tried to retain this link between movement and sound and capture the flexibility of time that one finds in a dream (and also when one deeply listens). Winged Fragments is dedicated to all those who do not recover, in the hopes that their swan wing becomes something beautiful.
