The ideas behind Webbed came from a variety of different sources. When Charlotte Munn-Wood asked me to write her a violin solo, I immediately gravitated towards the children’s story Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White. White wrote the book in Brooklin, Maine, not far from where I spend my summers in Sedgwick, so I have always had a close affinity for it. However, the story only influenced the general idea for Webbed, which draws inspiration from two other sources.
The first is syndactyly, the unusual condition of two or more digits being fused together, more commonly known as webbed hands or feet. The imagery of webbed appendages is reflected in Webbed in several ways. The first movement, Feet, focuses mainly on playing a recurring melody up and down the lowest string of the violin, where I imagined its “feet” would be. The third movement, Hands, consists mainly of finger tremolos to conjure the image of playing with webbed hands.
Webbed was also influenced by the works and writings of György Ligeti, whose childhood arachnophobia inspired terrifying musical moments in his later works. One passage in particular, from an analytical introduction to his first orchestral work, Apparitions, inspired my second movement, Webs. He writes:
“As a small child I once had a dream that I could not get to my cot, my safe haven, because the whole room was filled with a dense confused tangle of fine filaments. […] I was caught up in this immense web together with both living things and objects of various kinds. […] These sudden unexpected events brought about a change in the internal structure, in the texture of the web. In places knots formed, thickening into an almost solid mass, caverns opened up where shreds of the original web were floating about like gossamer. All these changes seemed like an irreversible process, never returning to earlier states again. An indescribable sadness hung over these shifting forms and structure, the hopelessness of passing time and the melancholy of unalterable past events.”