Radium Butterfly
Radium Butterfly is a piano work inspired both by concept albums, such as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Deerhoof’s Friend Opportunity, as well as Robert Schumann’s piano works like Papillons (French for “butterflies”) and Carnaval. In both genres, a number of mostly short pieces build on each other to create a larger work.
As a whole, Radium Butterfly is the first work in which I fully embraced the influence of popular music in my compositional approach. “Pramberly Lane” serves as an arresting prelude to the work, its title a play on the term “Praeambulum” and being loosely structured on the 12-bar blues. “Jitterybug” is a brief dance of rhythms inspired by glitch music. “March of the Woke Against the Enemies of Justice” recalls the final movement of Schumann’s Carnaval (“March of the League of David against the Philistines”) and also reflects the painful period for progressive Americans following the 2016 election. This movement is not ironic or facetious, but instead reflects how the process of discernment and nuance found in America’s progressive left makes it difficult to maintain cohesiveness and momentum due to the critical thought and the challenging of simplistic narratives central to our world view.
“Chanson d’amour” (French for “love song) is perhaps a bit ironic, sending up the dopey love songs so omnipresent in pop music while also recalling the ecstatic yet static depiction of love found in the music of Olivier Messiaen. “A Partial Transcription of Idioteque” is what it says it is, with “Idioteque” being a song on Radiohead’s Kid A album, one of the first rock albums I fell in love with when returning to non-classical music in my early 20s.
Finally, “Losing My Ego” is the longest and most introspective movement in Radium Butterfly, a piece whose title connects both to the original title of one of the songs on Pet Sounds and to John Cage’s attempts to remove his ego from the act of composing. This movement is the first time I have composed something inspired by the music of Morton Feldman, a composer whose influence I had for a long time staked my own ego on resisting.