atlas fractures (2016) - for wind ensemble

In the 2013 post-apocalyptic film Snowpiercer - based on Le Transperceneige, a French graphic novel from 1982 - a train barrels nonstop around the world, carrying the remnants of humanity through a world rendered uninhabitable by a human-caused ice age. These last people maintain order with a brutal totalitarian social structure, and both film and graphic novel follow one man as he leads a revolution against it. The trailer makes the film out to be a bit more action-blockbuster than it actually is, but it’s still worth watching (linked below).

I noticed some connections between Snowpiercer and the rigid, hyper-mechanized, exaggerated grandiosity of the trains and mills of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, which was the subject matter of my 2010 orchestral work The Concerto of Deliverance. I tried to capture all of these qualities - positive and negative - in this older piece. Atlas Fractures, however, breaks this material apart and turns it on its head. 

I see Snowpiercer as a dystopian sequel to Atlas Shrugged, and the fragmentation of this older piece is meant to reflect this. The first part, “The Fifth Concerto”, takes its title from a sub-narrative in Atlas Shrugged: the story of composer Richard Halley’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Halley - much like other male characters in the novel - is an elusive, blatantly exalted hero, and his fifth concerto is similarly shrouded in contrived mystery. Halley is the quintessential artist-narcissist, who self-righteously withholds his alleged greatness from society. The music here evokes an exaggerated heroism, confined by serial rhythmic structures, whose final burst of energy cuts to indifferent mechanical percussion. “imagining the Engine, from 1001 cars away” is a morass of uncoordinated sound, out of which emerges a truncated passage from my original work. The final part, “The Proloff Revolution”, refers to Snowpiercer’s main character (renamed “Curtis” in the film) and the fight he leads against the train’s totalitarian social structure. He and the destitute inhabitants of the rear car fight their way to the front, only to learn that their revolution has been futile.