Mother of Swirl
I’m strangely fascinated by iridescence. There’s something magical and nostalgic about the interplay of light, color, and movement in soap bubbles, oil slicks, opals, and crinkly cellophane.
That fascination led me to chambered nautilus shells, whose iridescent mother-of-pearl is enclosed within a graceful logarithmic spiral. As the animal grows, it builds ever-larger chambers that preserve the same geometry. This self-similar spira mirabilis (“miraculous spiral”) has captivated artists, mathematicians, and writers for centuries. Albrecht Dürer called it “the eternal line” (ewige Linie), Jacob Bernoulli had it engraved on his tombstone, and Oliver Wendell Holmes found in the nautilus a metaphor for spiritual growth.
As a composer, I’m interested in what the nautilus could mean within music itself. What would iridescent music sound like? How might music change “color” with changes of light? What would self-similar music sound like? Could we hear the same musical shape at different time scales?
Several longstanding interests of mine converged on the nautilus: the sensory wonder of iridescence, the mathematical elegance of the logarithmic spiral, and the many cultural meanings attached to this remarkable object. These ideas shaped both the underlying structure of the piece and the intuitive decisions I made while composing it.
In Mother of Swirl, melodies often remain unchanged while harmony and orchestration shift around them, like an iridescent surface changing with the light. The same musical material appears in fast and slow sections, echoing the spiral’s self-similarity, while gradually lengthening durations reflect the nautilus’ expanding chambers. And Mother of Swirl features prominent horn parts, because the horn is obviously the swirliest instrument.