Transmuting Ether // Quarantine-Dreams

Paul Mortilla, composer

Program notes can equally serve to elucidate as well as constrict the potential of music, yet the nature of this music remains relatively clear. The first few weeks of quarantine was both the conclusion of my time at Yale, as well as a new beginning of entering wild dreamscapes. Apparently, the overwhelmingly wild and vivid dreams seemed to be a widespread phenomenon as people began to experience new lives in isolation, harkening back to the sensory deprivation techniques of monastics in search of ecstasy and enlightenment. This work strives to extract many different musical forms from the same, distilled, monistic motif which unites it, in such a way that reflects the sort of delirium of wandering thoughts popping in and out of existence, similar in quantum creation annihilation pairs, when the mind drifts in the waking, hypnagogic stasis — often a byproduct of sleep deprivation.