Thistledown (2012)

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