Contrasted Perspectives

Over the past year, I have fallen in love with visual art, poetry and film from the Surrealist movement. Both the expansive, dream-like worlds and confluence of juxtaposing elements created by artists like Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Frederico García Lorca and Frederico Fellini (amongst others) have appealed to me greatly and have had a significant influence on my work. This piece attempts to explore these contrasting emotional worlds: the dream-like and the juxtaposed. The first movement, “Dalí” is most significantly influenced by his famous painting The Persistence of Memory. In Contrasted Perspectives, evocations of shimmering waves of heat, distant bells and clocks are interpolated with melodic fragments that foreshadow material that is to come in the second movement. The quasi-blurred, yet luminescent timbral world of this movement and its almost subconscious reference to the following movement aims to depict both the emotional and psychological state of one who is dreaming. The second movement, “Fellini,” deals with the idea of juxtaposition. What excites me most about Fellini’s films are how the unexpected juxtapositions of images and ideas create a multitude of emotional worlds ranging from mirth to terror to tragedy and everything in between. In this movement, I have attempted to explore the same idea of juxtaposition in two ways. On a surface level, I attempt to combine sounds that evoke elements of reality but are found in unlikely combinations in the hope of creating new and interesting sound worlds. On a structural level, I have juxtaposed various musical styles, from jazz, to Stravinsky, to an Italian-style opera overture while retaining a limited amount of musical material. In finding juxtaposition on both sonic and structural levels, I hope to have evoked this confluence of emotion that was expressed so vividly in the Surrealist movement.