Premiered in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, Santa Barbara, California, April 2022.
Apollo is an ancient Greek god of music, dance, and poetry, among other things. He embodies the ideals of beauty and grace. In 2020, I wrote a computer program (and composition) titled Apollo, the goal of which was to produce music that I thought embodied these ideals, albeit perhaps in an idiosyncratic way.
Apollo’s Descent uses outputs from the Apollo program, but about halfway through the piece I interrupt the purity of the output by deforming it and overlaying new material. The result is a destruction of the qualities of the original program.