“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” - H.P. Lovecraft

Like so many, I have been fascinated by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft for a long, long time.  Innsmouth, Massachusetts - 1927 is the first part of a planned triptych Three Places in (Lovecraftian) New England.  The piece is an homage, of sorts, to both Lovecraft  and my other favorite curmudgeonly, New England writer, Charles Ives.  

The result is pulpy horror music which, loosely, depicts a night in Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  Suffice it to say, things don’t go well that night.  From The Shadow Over Innsmouth:
 
“I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be...their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.”

Though the “monsters” are evocative and terrifying, it is the atmosphere of Innsmouth, Massachusetts that scares me most.  The collapsed, rotting buildings, the overwhelming stench of dead fish, the constant, looming sound of the tide, whose waves are bringing in terrors from the deep, dark places of the world - this atmosphere is what I have tried to capture musically.

Innsmouth, Massachusetts - 1927

Performed at Illinois State University
Jan 22nd, 2019

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