Arachnid (2023)

Full Orchestra | ca. 4'30"

Program Note

Arachnid is a through-composed, largely atonal work for orchestra that explores motivic and gestural development, and is evocative of what the title suggests — spiders. The primary subject is based on the syllables in the word "arachnid", and acts as the backbone of the work through layering, sequencing, augmentation, inversion, and reharmonization. In addition, the famous nursery rhyme "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" is fragmented and juxtaposed throughout the latter half of the composition, and ultimately takes over in a jarring crescendo before the work is abruptly capped off.