Blood Vapour
Flute Quartet - Sheet Music

Flute quartet

SKU: P2.10024

Composed by Cornelius Boots. Chamber music, 20th century. Published by Potenza Music (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).