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<< D E T A I L S >> Curious Squid for Orchestra (2007) Request Perusal Copy/Part Rental Information
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I have been somewhat obsessively reading Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels for a while now. It is a series set on a disc-shaped planet traveling on the backs of four giant elephants, who are standing on the back of a giant turtle named A’tuin. I found inspiration for this piece in the opening of Jingo, a Discworld book published in 1998.
The “Curious Squid” appear only briefly in this book, as a device to start a much larger storyline:
It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson. He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them. Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skyward with a splash. Some of them became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly toward them. The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good at making connections.
These squid were, for me, only a departure point for the beginning of the piece. For the past few years I’ve been writing music where the individual players were in some sort of conflict with each other. Sometimes resolved, sometimes not. For this piece, I wanted to try and break the cycle by having the players working more with each other than against. I was attracted to the idea of creatures whose main characteristic is an interest in the things around them. And, while certainly in the opening of this piece, I had an image of these strange creatures floating around in the darkness waiting for something to happen, I was not thinking “squid” for the entire piece. Much like in the book, they were a tool to get things going.
Curious Squid was written as a trio for the California E.A.R. Unit in 2007. That same year, the trio was expanded into a full orchestra work.
h o m e p a g e b i o g r a p h y w o r k s r e c o r d i n g s l i n k s c o n t a c t
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