Blood Vapour

SKU: P2.10024

The fourth part of the Chthonic Flute Suite commissioned by Areon Flutes in 2012. This suite has two main inspirations: ideologically it draws guidance from the book The Dream and the Underworld (1979)by James Hillman (1926-2011) and musically it explores the textural possibilities of a flute ensemble within the context of the heavy chamber music style I have developed with Edmund Welles: the bass clarinet quartet since 1996. The quartet is divided into three sections: Thymos--Phrenes--Chthonios. Thymos means blood vapour and is one of the elements that souls of the dead in the underworld completely lack, therefore they crave it and seek it out; they also lack breath consciousness or phrenes. The term chthonic [thon-ik] generally means underworld. However, Hillman thoroughly elaborates that its true meaning extends below the earth and beyond it (p.36) into invisible, non-physical and far distant psychic realms as opposed to being limited to a primitive earthiness that limits us to the physical and fertile underground. Hillman weaves a captivating and expanded perspective on chthonic and the deeper mysteries of the invisible, drawing from such sources as Greek and Egyptian mythology, Freud, Nietzsche, and more. The underworld is a realm of only psyche, a purely psychical world...underworld is the mythological style of describing a psychological cosmos. Put more bluntly: underworld is psyche. (p.46).