A traveler’s guide to Kaleidoscope Eyes:
I prefer to refer to separate divisions in my music as “parts,” because the singularity of tempo, mood, and material that typifies a “movement” can rarely be found in the music I love to create. It’s a musical structure that is much more inspired by the whimsical-but- somehow-compelling flow of the last 20 minutes of Abbey Road than the supposedly inevitable force of a Beethoven Symphony movement. This approach fits well with a stylistic worldview in which the juxtaposition and mixing of contrasting styles is embraced to the point of becoming its own musical idea and a philosophical affirmation.

The titles of the parts of Kaleidoscope Eyes chart their flow. The “tune” and “chorale” appear in different ways in each of the three parts. Each part is given its individual character-mix through “diversions” which create distinctive contexts for the returning pair of ideas.

Part One: fanfare.tune.chorale.diversion.chorale
A brief curtain-raiser (full of sound and fury, signifying nothing) is followed by the tune, the most important character in the piece. Painfully sweet. Full of longing, nostalgia, a little “Eleanor Rigby” trailing off into meaninglessness. The ensuing chorale is the second-most important character in the piece; its harmony sounds somehow functional and familiar, but colored to create a new kind of experience. The first part’s diversion (following a bustling introduction) is a polite little dance I nicknamed “Frenchy Baroque,” and I picture it with ruffled sleeves and a powdered wig. The surrounding environment for it provides horizontal and vertical edges. The eventual dissipation of this tune is a mini-tragedy. The following “inappropriately intense” chorale is an overblown reaction.

Part Two: tune.diversion.rock.ascent.skychorale
Beginning with a new statement of the tune, Part Two follows with a bubbly, ebullient C-major romp which crashes into a Purple Haze rock section. The “rock” spins out of orbit, giving way to dissolving ascending scales which collide with harmonic glissandos. We suddenly find ourselves on the inter-galactic edge of reality where we discover a disembodied celestial version of the chorale.

Part Three: tune.flight.rap.chorale.dusk
The tune, as it begins Part Three, is played by the first violin, but as it begins drifting the viola launches a flying scherzo whose triple-time subject exploits the four-note arpeggio taken from the middle of the tune. This buoyant, swirling material slams into a heavier, rougher section where the conflicts of groups of 3 and 4 are converted into a conflict of tempos — a tempo change every second — driving into a sustained super-scratch cluster which suddenly clears to reveal a consonant fanfare. The violence heightens in an insolent, defiant hip-hop-inspired section, mixing the sound of excessive bow pressure into hard-edged confrontational rhythms. At the top of a 7-voice two-octave tremolo- glissando, a sustained sonority morphs from glassy purity to scratch-tone distortion and a pizzicato explosion. In its aftermath, a quarter-tone cluster expands by way of a glacial voice-crossing glissando to the final granite reprise of the chorale. The tune returns, fragmented, fragile, wandering off into some transcendent netherworld….
— Don Freund