Enlightenment
for flautist (contrabass flute, bass flute, alto flute, C flute and piccolo), clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano (2008; 17 min.)
While in Mexico City in 2006, I spent an evening in the home of two musicians I deeply admire, composer Gabriela Ortíz and her husband, flautist-composer Alejandro Escuer. After dinner, Alejandro offered to show me two instruments he had recently acquired from a maker in the Netherlands: a contrabass and a sub-contrabass flute. These remarkable contraptions of PVC pipe allow a flautist to play in the range of the double bass and the tuba, and they have a haunting, chthonic quality. I fell in love with them immediately.
Because Alejandro plays all members of the flute family, I hit upon the idea of writing a piece in which he would start out on the contrabass flute (he vetoed the subcontrabass because it’s so cumbersome to transport) and gradually work his work up to the piccolo. (The score allows for the substitution of bass flute if a contrabass isn’t available.) When he mentioned that he’d be interested in my including his entire ONIX ensemble in the piece, I decided that all of the other instrumentalists would follow the same trajectory, from very low to very high, and that the rate at which the music unfolded would reinforce this arc of ascending energy- starting out almost inertly, then slowly and steadily accelerating to demonic velocity.
Two meanings of the title refer to these aspects of the plot line: the music becomes gradually more luminous as the notes rise, as well as more and more free of weight and encumbrance as the beat quickens. A third meaning of “enlightenment” is a state of spiritual understanding, often reached in a moment of transcendent revelation. The climax of the piece, a white-hot vortex of sound in which pitch and rhythm seem to vanish into a singularity, might be though of as representing such a moment. And indeed, on the other side we emerge into a different world, still at the uppermost extreme of musical pitch but now crystalline, mystical, a music of eternity rather than of time.
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