Variations on Emotion No. 3 - Wonder/Discovery - "A Lifetime Searching"
About two years ago now, I wrote a suite of 11 pieces called Variations on Emotion. As the title might suggest, all of the pieces are about a separate emotion that I had chosen to represent musically. Each piece is labeled with the emotion attached to it, and each title was inspired by the emotion. It was a purely emotional experience and I attached stories to most of them afterward, as represented by the title. This is the third of eleven, being Wonder/Discovery.
"Wonder is a fascinating emotion. It is one that seems to drive the human race. Why does this happen? How does this work? These are questions driven by the emotion of wonder. Illustrating this emotion musically would be a far more difficult task than the previous two endeavors. It is far more complex musically and instrumentally. For this, I decided to use a full orchestra, and I went a step beyond that utilizing different percussion and the introduction of a full chorus. The piece starts off with a single instrument, the piccolo, and very quickly grows into half of the orchestra. This was meant to symbolize the fleeting thought of curiosity that one might have that always seems to immediately swell into an insatiable hunger for an answer to one's questions. It swells into a fragment of the main melody and crescendos into an introspective 8 bar phrase that represents the questions churning about it ones mind. This is why, during this section, you will hear the choir "Ooo-ing". From there it moves on to the main melody of the piece, played by the oboe and then the upper strings. The mid section of the piece is marginally more up beat and has a different tone. More along the lines of "curiosity killed the cat", because often times when you ask too many questions, you won't always like the answer that you get and this is again stated at the very end of the piece. The title A Lifetime Searching comes from the idea of an Indiana Jones like character that has been searching for this great mystery for his entire life. The piece is also meant to represent that story musically. He begins on his journey, finds what he's looking for, and discovers it was not meant to be disturbed, attempts to return things to normal, leaves, but discovers his actions will have dire consequences that he was unable to foresee. Hence the "curiosity killed the cat" moral of the story and why that is represented musically as well. I found this piece in particular to be one of the most enjoyable and cerebral pieces that I'd written out of the eleven. I hope that the listener enjoys it as much as I enjoyed writing and that they again understand the feelings and ideas I was trying to intimate." -Travis Grubissi
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