...and there's always music in the air."

Score / parts

Instrumentation and duration

Flute and string quartet

Duration: 15 minutes

Movements

I. Shadow of a twisted arm across my house

II. Garden in the city of industry

III. I see myself

Commission / dedications

Hommage to David Lynch

First performance

Johanna Kärkkäinen, flute, Into String Quartet: Linda Suolahti, violin, Sirja Puurtinen, violin, Mari Viluksela, viola, Jarkko Launonen, cello, Ajassa 2011! Festival, Kapsäkki Music Theatre, Helsinki, Finland, March 15, 2011

Composer's Notes

March 15, 2011

The immaculately polished façades and the simmering tensions and traumas beneath—sometimes culminating in harrowingly perverse events and devastating human fates triggered by the collapse of those façades—seem to lie at the very core of David Lynch’s (1946-2025) surreal and dreamlike cinematic storytelling. They are the fuel that keeps his creative flame alive.

Onto this stage, where the theatre of self-centered—thus deeply human—artificiality and superficial well-being inevitably collides with merciless truth, Lynch casts game pieces in the form of characters that are often absurd and highly stylized. Yet these characters, with painful precision, illuminate the deepest traits of the human condition. Crippled by their own weaknesses, or sometimes crushed by faceless structural violence, they reflect a bleak picture of the society we live in even today.

In Lynch’s stark visions, the horror of recognizing—or denying—truth can, at its worst, completely shatter the mind, leaving one lost in the shadows, as happens to Fred in Lost Highway (1996). Often, physical death becomes the only release from pain and hopeless dead ends. “In heaven, everything is fine,” sings a woman in Lynch’s first feature-length film Eraserhead (1976). Similarly, in Mulholland Drive (2001), Diane, overwhelmed by a bleak past and unbearable guilt over a horrifying deed, chooses irreversible detachment from her suffering and burdens. What remains is only eternal peace and silence—silencio.

Having followed Lynch’s films, television projects, paintings, photography, writings, and other endeavors since the 1990s, I’ve long been drawn to the idea of exploring the intense thoughts and emotions these works have stirred in me through musical means—not by interpreting, explaining, or deconstructing them, but by creating a kind of “musical state of being,” a personal sonic response or echo to the images and feelings they’ve evoked in me. I recall already considering such a project in the autumn of 2003, so the idea has been gestating for a long time.

The process has started and stalled many times, and the instrumentation has changed repeatedly along the way. Other, more clearly defined projects have often taken priority, and my thoughts on this work have remained in constant flux. Yet the idea always returned to me, resurfacing from time to time. A fitting opportunity to finally realize the piece arose when I was invited to contribute a work to this evening’s concert. The instrumentation changed once more, but the combination of flute and string quartet felt like a natural fit for the ideas that had been with me for so many years.

This piece is dedicated, with my deepest respect, to the great visionary, thinker, and humanist David Lynch.