Dream Of The Innocent

I wrote this piece in the summer of 2004, inspired fully by a book called Prospero's Children by a very talented and poetic lady called Jan Siegel. The book is just beautiful... the language, the imagery. :) I totally fell in love with it! So anyway, this piece is based on a scene from the book. In my mind I imagined it unfolding as a film... and this would be the score.

If you've read the book then you'll remember the scene in which the Fern rides the windhorse (unicorn) to the ocean or stars at the edge of time. It's very beautiful, and very inspiring... so I sort of based this music on it. Loosely. I changed bits. Including the entire beginning and the end of the scene The middle is the same though! The unicorn represents many things. Magic, dreams, innocence, loneliness... I *tried* to put those qualities across in the music. Yes yes. Anyway... this is what happens in the scene:


0:00 - A young girl awakens to find herself in a beautiful meadow; a dreamscape. She's lying in the grass under a white tree. The sky is veiled in a pale aurora that shimmers in the light. She sits up slowly, amazed, taking in the beauty of everything around her...

0:37 - She sees the windhorse at the far end of the meadow, pure white, its horn glowing. It's kind of skipping around, as wild unicorns do...

0:55 - The windhorse approaches...

1:10 - Now he's standing about a yard away, just looking at her. He's beautiful, pure white; almost translucent. And his eyes are gentle and kind and deep, and even a little lonely... But very beautiful.

1:33 - He steps even closer now and she touches him, stroking his silvery mane.

1:54 - He kneels. Sits. Whatever the word is to describe horses when they're kind of down on their horsey knees. He looks up at her.

2:10 - She climbs on his back.

2:20 - He gets up and begins to move, slowly at first, then into a trot, to a run...

2:40 - Running quite fast now, but smoothly and gracefully, none of that lumpy thumpy clumsy stuff. :)

3:00 - Faster and faster...

3:34 - Galloping now, as fast as the wind... the world is a blur around them.

3:52 - Time and reality begin to distort, and the windhorse is no longer running along the ground, but on a path of bright light. No longer with the wind, he *is* the wind.

4:01 - The light gets brighter and brighter.

4:10 - They emerge on an endless crescent beach - a place beyond reality, beyond time. There are mountains blacker than night on one side, and the sky is like velvet, but littered with dazzling stars. This place is immortal, a place of gods where no mortal has ever been before.

4:53 - As the windhorse runs along the shore, it kicks up a trail of crystal stars behind, and gazing at the ocean, the girl can see no horizon... sky and sea merge together. The ocean itself is made of stars, so beautiful and so bright it hurts to look for long.

5:29 - The shore and the ocean and the stars and the night begin to dissolve in an aurora of light... slowly disintegrating, leaving only the memory.

6:23 - Finding herself in the real world, lying in the grass beneath a tree, the girl sits up and sees the pale ghost of a unicorn, standing in front of her. It bends its head, and as she reaches out to touch the ghostly horn, the vision slowly fades...

7:00 - But the memory remains inside her forever.

:)

And that is that.


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Electric violin and vocals are recordings. The rest was created with a sequencer & lots of prettypretty soundfonts. :)

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Preview image: Stock from GettyImages. (duh. :))