Flute, Oboe, Bb Clarinet, and Piano
10’
I. Agitato (3')
II. Adagio Rapsodico (4')
III. Vivace Estatico (3')
“When I began working on this piece, only two or three weeks before the projected deadline, I was struggling with severe creative blocks. One morning, I woke up from a series of strange dreams around 5 a.m. with an image in my mind: a white room with ropes and bands stretched from wall to wall, forming in the center an enormous, tangled mass. Along with the image came a sort of auditory evocation: a continuous, unrelenting sound mass, which was actually thousands, millions maybe, of different melodies and musical ideas, indistinguishable from the mass. I realized this was the inside of my mind. Depressed by the seeming absence of ideas during this critical creative period, it was shown to me that it wasn’t an absence of ideas in my mind, but rather a kind of ‘jam’ caused by the disorganized entanglement of many ideas, which could be extricated only by writing, with patience, with focus. This inspired the suite, named after the famously inextricable Gordian knot. There are three movements. The first movement is evocative of those knots and tangles. The second is a gentle unraveling, and the third is the freedom and excitement that follows once the knots are loosened.” ~ Composer Catherine Fields
Flute, Oboe, Bb Clarinet, and Piano
10’
I. Agitato (3')
II. Adagio Rapsodico (4')
III. Vivace Estatico (3')
“When I began working on this piece, only two or three weeks before the projected deadline, I was struggling with severe creative blocks. One morning, I woke up from a series of strange dreams around 5 a.m. with an image in my mind: a white room with ropes and bands stretched from wall to wall, forming in the center an enormous, tangled mass. Along with the image came a sort of auditory evocation: a continuous, unrelenting sound mass, which was actually thousands, millions maybe, of different melodies and musical ideas, indistinguishable from the mass. I realized this was the inside of my mind. Depressed by the seeming absence of ideas during this critical creative period, it was shown to me that it wasn’t an absence of ideas in my mind, but rather a kind of ‘jam’ caused by the disorganized entanglement of many ideas, which could be extricated only by writing, with patience, with focus. This inspired the suite, named after the famously inextricable Gordian knot. There are three movements. The first movement is evocative of those knots and tangles. The second is a gentle unraveling, and the third is the freedom and excitement that follows once the knots are loosened.” ~ Composer Catherine Fields
