MURMURATION

Program Notes

The term "murmuration" refers to the collective noun for a group of starlings in flight, and it also describes the technique used in composing this piece. After watching several videos of the undulating, ethereal clouds of starling murmurations, I came upon an article that described how recent advances in motion capture technology and computational modeling have led to new theories of how the birds achieve such fascinating and tightly-grouped flight patterns.

The basic concept of "swarm theory" (when one bird moves, so do all of the surrounding birds) reminded me of how it feels to play music in any kind of ensemble, which is essentially an organism unto itself. With this piece, I attempted to capture this kind of collective, instantaneous, and continuous change - which scientists call "criticality" - in musical structures that mimic the "systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation" that comprise starling murmurations.

But in order to effectively depict the kind of change desired, I decided that there must be an existing structure in place for me to manipulate. For this reason I chose to use the setting of O Magnum Mysterium by Tomas Luis de Victoria. In my piece, I introduce every pitch of Victoria's music in the original order, but I alter almost every other factor: different ranges, durations, and rhythms are subjected to repetition, inversion, and recombination so that the music becomes a murmuration of the original work. Motives are pitted against each other in new ways and harmonies blur together to create an enticing ambiguity.