Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- George Lewis
Thistledown (2012)
- C.F. Peters Corporation (World)
Written for Ensemble Either/Or, and performed by them in November 2013 as part of the concert series of the New York Chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Programme Note
Composer note
Written for and premiered by Ensemble Either/Or in 2012, the title of the work is drawn from Greg Bear’s novel Eon (1985), in which a team sent to investigate the sudden appearance of an enormous asteroid in Earth’s skies discovers that the asteroid is in fact a human-built starship from their own future, which has now overlapped with their present. Named “Thistledown” by its builders, the asteroid contains various chambers, including a highly evolved city, but the seventh chamber, a human technological construct called “The Way,” appears to stretch beyond the dimensions of the asteroid, leading to parallel universes that render irrelevant the notion of a single, final destination for the starship’s journey. Analogously, my piece could be said to present a number of chambers that listeners may visit and inhabit. Each chamber possesses its own character, while overlapping temporally with others to present a rough and smearing future at ironic odds with the fragility implied by the work’s title, and continually deferring all teleological reckoning.
— George Lewis