Metamorphosis of My Cat Fletcher, flute and video (1993, revised 2008).

Metamorphosis of my Cat Fletcher has a long history. I started the piece in 1993 at the request of flutist Paul Thompson. Paul planned to present a concert of solo flute music and he was looking for a new piece to add variety to the program. The one stipulation was that it would not have a piano accompaniment. I went home to think about what sort of piece I would compose and I drew a blank. I thought about the advice given by everybody's high school creative writing teacher: "write about what you know." This advice seems pretty trite, but it's actually a very important idea. At the same time, our cat wanted his dinner—he would not take "no" for an answer. It occurred to me that the cat was something that "I knew." Why not write a piece about Fletcher?

I recorded sounds made by Fletcher into a small digital field recorder. A also included sounds of household items: a small Turkish bell, that Fletcher liked to knock off the table, the strings of a mountain dulcimer that hung on our wall (Fletcher often brushed the strings with his fluffy tail as he walked across the back of the couch. I also caught him once plucking the strings with his teeth).

Once I had the basic sounds for the piece, I needed an idea for a form. I liked the idea of theme and variations. It seemed like it would be fun to turn the form on its head and do the theme last. In that way, the audience would be left guessing as to the nature of the theme until the last movement. I needed a famous theme to make this work. I looked at Fletcher and realized that he resembled a famous composer. I had my theme.

I put the piece together and premiered it myself at a summer music camp at Southeast Missouri State University. This camp was, at one time, cited as the largest summer music camp in the world. There were several thousand students spread out over three or four weeks. When I took the stage the students were pretty quiet, but after a few cat howls came from the loud speakers there ensued fifteen minutes of bedlam. Campers were literally rolling in the aisles. Stravinsky would have been proud. The problem was that nobody guessed what the theme was before the final movement. Even the teachers didn't recognize it. This puzzled me a little because I had included some of the lyrics of the theme on the tape. The fact that they were in German, and that the people speaking them were using "cartoon" voices, probably made them difficult to understand.

So I added video to the piece. Originally, the video consisted of simple subtitles for the text, but I got carried away and added photos of Fletcher, cartoons of Fletcher, paintings of Fletcher. The technology available at the time was very crude and in 2008 I updated the video adding more animation and a few 3D rendered images. Fletcher has been performed quite a bit over the years for children. It's a good way to introduce them to extended techniques for the flute and to the idea of Musique Concrete. It's also been performed on college campuses. The photos below are from a 2011 performance by Paul Thompson at the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors national convention, University of Florida, Gainesville.

Metamorphosis of My Cat Fletcher, Paul Thompson, flute (exceprt).