metamorphoses: nychterídes - Adrian Mocanu

The book Metamorphoses by the ancient Greek grammarian Antoninus Liberalis includes a story of the three daughters of king Minyas, who refused to be part of the cult of Dionysus, orgiastic bacchanalia of the maenads. O ended, the god of wine made the sisters go insane and turned them into bats (Greek nychterídes) as a form of punishment. 

In this piece I seek to explore the various sonorities produced by the bats and integrate them into instrumental writing from the point of view of the Bacchic aesthetics. The other aspect of the piece is the process of transformation, metamorphosis in the context of a correlation between the Apollonian and Dionysian philosophical concepts, between the humane and the animalistic, between order and chaos, rational thinking and pure instinct. 

Adrian Mocanu