Mr Palomar - Will Handysides (2013-14)
Performed by Bit20 Ensemble, conducted by Trond Madsen at Østre in Bergen, Norway on 9th May 2014.

The original inspiration for this piece was the Magritte’s work The Mysteries of the Horizon. I was attracted by the trio of identical men each facing a different direction under a crescent moon.The work seemed to describe one person with different personalities or someone looking at the world with from different perspectives. However I found it difficult to make concrete enough parallels between painting and music for this alone to generate material for my piece. I then searched for a work of literature with similar themes. The novel I was most struck by was Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino. As a post-modern structuralist, the form of Calvino’s novels are always interesting, inventive and playful. Mr Palomar is a series of 27 short chapters which each describe or meditate upon the subject matter in varying ways according to 3 perspectives (1, 2 and 3).
- 1 is generally focussed on visual material and tends to be purely descriptive
- 2 contains anthropological aspects, often taking the form of some kind of story
- 3 is more speculative, considering man’s place in the universe and matters of life and death 

The chapters start off with the most purely descriptive and are labelled 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.2.1.... etc. until 3.3.3. which is the most meditative and speculative, in which Mr Palomar ‘Learns to be dead’.
This precise structure gave me a very rigid framework upon which to build my piece. My Mr Palomar consists of 27 episodes of varying length - somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes - which somehow relate to 3 musical areas. Some of these episodes also allude directly to scenes from the novel.

- 1 is purely sound constructions, often based on a spectrum some of which are taken from heard sounds, such as boat horns.
- 2 draw on humanity’s experiences of sound and music and our uses for both, culminating in a distortedViennese waltz in the very middle of the piece (2.2.2).
- 3 take the form of ritualised, meditative episodes.

Mr Palomar 3.

Will Handysides