View From The Strangers’ Gallery is an oratorio that illustrates important current topics in cognitive science.  I set out to find a musical language to represent the simultaneous and “multitrack” nature of “processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs” as described by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Consciousness Explained and other works.  By flexibly varying the depth of polyphonic structures in the piece, I illustrate simultaneity in the brain and the ebb and flow of activation and attention. 

A rich internal dialogue and debate rages within each of the three movements, with the music’s stops and starts and overlapping voices reflecting the constant revisions and alterations of the multiple streams of consciousness (as described in Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model.  Throughout the piece, I use fragmented, abstract musical forms to represent the issues of subjective experience and “self-binding” that the philosopher Nicholas Humphrey sees as central to the project of “creating a person’s life.”

Performance Requirements

	Full orchestra* with keyboard synthesizer, alto and tenor saxophones, five timpani**, and a drum kit
	Eight pop singers (miked) and one classically-trained soprano.

    *Any instruments other than strings can be supplemented with MIDI instruments
    **If piccolo timpani is not available, use tom-tom or roto-tom instead

 

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