ENS.1998.2 | 10′
24 Horns
Butterfly Stories
Butterfly Stories was composed as the “overnight assignment” during my (successful) May 1998 audition for the Manhattan School of Music. After completing a series of exams I was given a prompt instructing me to create for the next day’s interview a composition “in honor of the American Lepidopteral Society’s International Exhibition of Butterflies Grand Opening.”
Over six heavily caffeinated hours in the early hours of the morning I then wrote this entire piece from scratch into full score. This edition incorporates an alternate ending written a few days later, but otherwise differs from the original manuscript only in small editorial details.
That night I immediately rejected the obvious idea of writing something bright and mercurial: I suspected most of my fellow applicants were already working on similar airy overtures. Instead, I took the shape of the butterfly’s lifecycle as a metaphor for the development of Western music, the form of my piece recapitulating both a butterfly’s progression from egg to insect and European music’s progress from a sequence of chanted pitches to chordal harmony, thence to heterophony, complex polyphony, and beyond.
First we hear the basic 27 note row presented in cascading flight by several horns as a kind of ideal butterfly in utero. The butterfly egg is then represented as a talea and color, in which isorhythmic fragments derived from the melody we have not yet heard begin to impose order on the chaos. Gradually a larval melody appears out of the note row, unadorned.
This melodic caterpillar spins itself a heterophonic cocoon, breaking parts off itself and reconstituting them into a pupa, chunks of melody heard against themselves in close canons. These melodies eventually grow into full restatements of the larval theme heard against itself in retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion: the chrysalis.
Finally the piece reaches its florid climax as the butterfly emerges and spreads its wings. But not for long: most butterflies live only a few weeks or less. And in the mysterious coda we hear echoes of the butterfly melody pinned in a case, dusty, faded, gone.