Remember The Molecules

Remember The Molecules borrows its title and much of its musical imagery from Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It—a book that continues to move me in new ways each time I read it. If you’re not familiar with the story or the 1992 movie adaptation directed by Robert Redford starring a young Brad Pitt, the scene is this: Montana fly-fishing country, deep in a canyon next to one of the strongest rivers in Montana, the Big Blackfoot River.

The piece is probably my most organic composition for wind band. I say “organic” because the piece is “through-composed,” which generally means that it was written without any traditional form or musical structure. The piece also doesn’t really have a traditional melody. So what ends up taking the spotlight are the smaller musical ideas. These little motifs, energized with rhythm, combine and entangle themselves, “one rhythm superimposed upon another” to form a larger musical architecture.

Like many great works of art, Maclean’s novella is about more than just fly fishing. As a semi-autobiographical narrative, Maclean’s own family and his personal relationships with them are woven into the book’s subtext. At the heart of the music sprouts a single motivic seed composed of three notes, Ab-Bb-G. When sounded, these pitches imply two significant intervals that appear throughout the piece: a Major second (Ab-Bb) and a Major seventh (Ab-G). These two intervals are both the closest and one of the furthest removed within a diatonic octave. This juxtaposition of neighboring pitches and distant ones suggests a kind of intervallic duality, which is intended to echo an ever-present theme throughout Maclean’s story, that “it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us” (104).