ILLUSIONS INTO AN ALTERNATE REALITY
for String Orchestra  

by W. Brent Sawyer
Began in 1992 and finished 2020
approx. length: 13:00 minutes

This piece is about different dense soundscapes interfering with each other.

The story of the music is: A schizophrenic person who also has multiple personality disorder is having a conference between all his/her personas and many talk at the same time.  The listener is orbiting this conversation. Sometimes what is being said and acted upon can be heard and understood, but many times it is just a cacophony of different personas trying to speak over the other with just glimmers of recognition. It is a distorted view of our schizo's world.

The idea for this piece came to me in 1991 when I was in college at SMU. I had been studying a lot of 20th century composers (Pendercki, Cowell, Babbit, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Crumb, etc...) so, you will notice many influences. I am also a big Horror movie fan, so those film composers also have inspired me as well. The piece was never completed back in 1991 and sat in my files for decades. In 2017, I came across the original manuscript and decided to revisit the piece and I have, from time to time,  been rewriting and revising it since then. This is the October 2020 version.