The Alph through Gardens Bright

cello with signal processing
Duration: 15:00
Date of Composition: 1994

PROGRAM NOTES:

The Alph Through Gardens Bright is a musical fantasy, or a dream piece, based on Samuel Coleridge’s well-known poem, Kubla Khan, which itself has been described as “a vision in a dream.”  The music does not follow the narrative order of the poem so much as evoke its general atmosphere.  Coleridge wrote his poem upon awakening from a deep sleep induced by an opium anodyne, and although not one note of The Alph Through Gardens Bright was drug induced, my compositional method was to clear the conscious mind as much as possible and allow the unconscious to do the work.  The result is a stream-of-consciousness piece, of what I call excursive form in that the music seems to take the listener on a journey.  Literary critics have often remarked that a “desert island” quality obtains in Coleridge’s work, a loneliness which, I believe, is expressed in the music by great spaciousness, electronically created by long reverberation times.  In addition, the electronically processed cello sound conjures as sense of magic or mystery.  Indeed, Coleridge compared the artist-composer-poet to a magician or sorcerer when he wrote near the end of his poem: “And all who heard should…Beware!  Beware!  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!  For he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.”    -James Sellars

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