NIGHTMAZE

WATCH EXCERPT WITH VIDEO

A sleep-deprived college student who has just completed final exams dreams of driving on a darkened interstate highway. Rather than Freud's royal road to the unconscious, this one is cheekily literal: as in a video game, we watch from the driver's perspective as road signs approach indicating forks and turnoffs for vacuity, darkness, ego, id, pleasure, terror, death. All the while, a narrator (Rinde Eckert) recites a tense play-by-play written by the novelist Thomas Bolt above a chamber score by Sebastian Currier, conducted by Charles Neidich.  Mr. Currier's rich and imaginative music sets the right tone, with its fractured and dissonant baroque-like gestures leading off like highway exits into the void and hinting at distant reservoirs of emotion and yearning.

-New York Times

                                                    Program Note

Nightmaze is a multimedia work for live instrumental ensemble, spoken voice, digitally processed sound, and video  projection.  Commissioned by the Network for New Music with funding from the Barlow Foundation, Nightmaze was created by composer Sebastian Currier (music) in collaboration with video designer Sage Marie Carter (video) and writer Thomas Bolt (text, roadsigns).  As Nightmaze begins, a college student, after studying without sleep for three days straight, has just finished his final exams in Physics, Cosmology, Psychology, Economics, and “the Male Sublime.” He falls into a deep sleep and—his mind saturated with half-understood ideas—dreams he is rushing along a dark, enormous highway on which he is the only driver.

Nightmaze follows his journey through a dream world of sexual desire, fear, and longing ordered only by the strange roadsigns that loom up along the way, forcing him to choose his course from among their stark, binary options.  Nightmaze uses tightly interlocking music, narration, and animation to evoke the dark and glittering sweep of a nightmare Interstate (labeled UNCONSCIOUS 1). The music’s incessant motion underscores the road’s changing rhythm as the dreaming protagonist is confronted again and again with foreshortened warnings, forced instructions, and paired alternatives out of Freud, physics, cosmology, and the philosophy of Edmund Burke.

While the music is rich and dynamic, the video is spare, showing only the empty highway and its strange signs, which emerge from the distance and rush past overhead as the baffled dreamer speeds on into the night.

Scoring
fl.cl-trp-perc(1):vib/SD/2cyms/hi hat/cowbell/tamb/glsp/brake drs/crot-pft.kybd-vln.vcl.db-narrator-video projections-4 channel electronics 
This work requires additional technological components and/or amplification. . 


Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.