Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth

Movement VII. Flight

Continuing the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis...

This is the shortest of the nine movements, weighing in at just over thirty seconds. After the adversary motive breaks the suspended abeyance of the sixth movement, this movement is a purely visceral escape with no goal in mind.

To emphasize the lack of planning, there are no real melodies in this movement -- all of the material is grabbed from rhythms and counterpoints of previous movements and mashed together. The feeling I was trying to get, especially with the oboe line, is that you are hearing a counter-line to an unheard melody -- a melody that you could probably identify by filling in the gaps, if only there were time to do so.

I love writing things in fast 3/4 time, but hate how quickly the score fills up with barlines when I do. Because it seems wasteful to devote so many paper pages to something under a minute long, I decided to wrap up quickly and move on to the next section.

Listen to the seventh movement (0:40 MP3)

Jump to Movement: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX