Will Rowe

Violin, Cello, and Electric Guitar

From the composer:

After reading The Power of Babel by linguist John McWhorter, I began to conceive of language as a Hydra: each head with its own distinct personality, growing out of different necks and sharing different relationships with various head-siblings in what must be the most complicated family dynamic ever. I can only imagine each of them wondering how some of their siblings/niblings grew in closer proximity than others, how some heads turned out the way they did, and how they can reconcile their different relationships to their shared, multi-generational body.

In the first chapter of the book, McWhorter offers five different ways in which a language can transform into many others: erosion and truncation of sounds, transformations to grammar, loss of an idiom's expressiveness, rebracketing of sounds, and broadening/narrowing semantic meaning of words and phrases over time. While certainly these do not occur in their own vacuums in a practical linguistic sense, the templates to transformation of sounds could certainly be applied to musical ideas as well. A Hydra's Guide to Parenthood is a set of variations on a root theme, each applying one of the five aforementioned transformative processes.

Review:

“That was one of the most queerly delicious things I’d heard in months. That sounded like what life is to me… They were talking. They were REALLY talking… I intend to hear that again.”

- John McWhorter on “A Hydra’s Guide to Parenthood,” Relevant Tones Live

Gear needed for electric guitar:

General:

• Whammy bar
• Ebow
• Slide

Pedals:

• Volume Pedal
• Delay pedal
• Distortion pedal
• Expression pedal
• Freeze pedal
• Ring modulator