for percussion quartet
[flowerpots, vibraphone & marimba]

duration: 9 minutes

premiered by Sō Percussion, Princeton University, 2012

Download includes score only. No parts available. (But I promise the score isn't super annoying to play from.)

Why “Taxidermy”? I just find the word strangely compelling, and it evokes something grand, awkward, epic, silent, funny, and just a bit creepy — all characteristics of this piece, in a way. The repeated phrase toward the end (“the detail of the pattern is movement”) is a little concept I love trying (and failing) to imagine. It comes from T.S. Eliot’s beautiful and perplexing Burnt Norton (from the Four Quartets), and I’ve used it before in other work — as a kind of whimsical existentialist mantra.