June 9, 2022

Arthur Zankel Music Center

​

Exponential Ensemble

Flute - Anna Urrey

Oboe - Stuart Breczinski

Clarinet - Pascal Archer

Piano - Amir Farid

In this piece, a rabbit tessellation* comes to life! One rabbit separates from the tessellation and finds it can freely explore the environment in which it lives. At the end of its journey, it falls from a great height and smashes back into the tessellation of many rabbits. The cycle continues.

 

I dream new music almost every night, and have learned to memorize the ideas in a lucid dream state before waking up, usually multiple times a night, to record them as voice memos, which I later transcribe in a journal. The ideas in Tessellations came from a wide array of dreams, ranging from seeing scores of “Haydn’s Toccattas and Fugues” morphing into a phantom carriage ride, to a hip-hop bunny rapping to the amazement of students and staff in a university dining hall.

 

*A tessellation is the covering of a surface using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. The artist M.C. Escher was famous for making tessellations using animals such as fish and birds.