Hello! This is a fresh-off-the-presses piece I hope may dovetail well with this week’s prompt! While the track consists of a trio for alto flute and two C flutes, it was composed with the hope that others may add to it, improvise on top, or otherwise re-envision it.

All tracks were recorded by me, alone in my studio…a trio for soloist (the loneliest number!). I am getting a kick out of the idea that a trio could form the basis for another trio…a trio-within-a-trio…there’s something fractal-like going on here.

Here’s the description I put with an accompanying video:

Imagery: Mammillaria heyderi (Little Nipple Cactus, or Heyder Pincushion Cactus) in bloom, far west Texas, Spring 2023

Sound: This trio for one alto and two C flutes was inspired by a lecture titled “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radical Abstraction” in which one of O’Keeffe’s works — Abstraction White Rose — was described as existing on a spectrum between realism and abstraction…or perhaps it is paradoxically both at the same time?

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

Sheet music available upon request.
All are welcome to use this piece as a basis for improvisation.

Abstraction Cactus Flower © 2023 by Alyce Santoro is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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