The score to John Woolrich’s Spalanzani’s Daughter

Spalanzani’s Daughter is a 10-minute piece for chamber ensemble of four woodwind and four brass. The title of Woolrich’s 1983 work alludes to ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman; Spalanzani is the unsettling scientist who is “father” to Olympia, latterly revealed to be an uncanny automaton of his design. Woolrich’s piece layers mechanistic rhythmic and melodic patterns over each other in imitation of this figure. Different sections are demarcated by sudden scalic flurries, silences, or moments of textual transparency, before the piece begins to wind down like a clockwork mechanism and finishes in relative quiet.