"While Orpheus Dreamed" genre: Symphonic
	lo fi play (dial-up) hi fi play (broadband) download (9.2 MB)	email track to a friend	add to My.MP3
	Commissioned by Orchestra Sonoma, this is a 12-minute pastorla idyll for orchestra.
	Credits: Orchestra Sonoma, live recording, March 1999
	Story Behind the Song I confess that, as with nearly all my pieces, I composed tonight's work without any title in mind. I do this because I prefer to see what the experience of writing the piece reveals to me about the nature of the music and thereby determine what title best suits it. During the composition of "While Orpheus Dreamed" I had the very strong (and very strange) impression that the music was somehow not "real" - that music so simple and innocent and direct had no place in the complex and often forbidding world of present-day art music; and in that sense the music struck me as being somehow "make-believe." I had even considered (and, thankfully, quickly rejected) such titles "Once Upon A Time." The title, "While Orpheus Dreamed" came to me in exactly the way the music came to me: spontaneously and, seemingly, from some source far outside my conscious control. By invoking the name of the legendary musician Orpheus, I am associating the music not with "fairy tales" (which are mere fantasy and wishful thinking), but with something much more potent: myth. Myth, to loosely paraphrase both Joseph Campbell and C.S. Lewis, "tells a story that is more true than we know how to describe in our everyday understanding." And so, I feel the music evokes (for me, at least) the kind of deep direct truth about things that we experience in myth. In its stream-of-consciousness flow and hazy, impressionistic tone colors, it also calls to mind dreaming states; and I imagine that Orpheus - the great mythic musician of our classical culture - might hear such beguiling music when he himself dreams.

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).