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Quartet
2013
Bass Clarinet
Clarinet
- Program Notes
- The Legend of the Withered Corpse, composed in 2013 is a humorous choro inspired by a frightening Brazilian legend. Deep in the misty peaks and dense valleys of the Mantiqueira mountain range (in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil), local tradition tells of a man so brutally cruel and evil in life that when he died, both Heaven and Hell rejected his soul, and the very soil of the mountains spewed his body back up, refusing to let his corpse decay. Stripped of all moisture by divine curse, his skin tightened over bone into a mummified, bark-like husk known as the Corpo Seco (The Withered Corpse). Cursed to wander the cold, winding trails of the Mantiqueira forever, this ghoulish wanderer clings to mossy trees and shadows, waiting to ambush unsuspecting travelers, drain their life force, or strangle them with dried, branch-like claws to feed a mindless hunger that can never be sated.