Dragonslayer: musical composition and mythical thought

Abstract

The work V.trahan (2017), composed by Luigi Antonio Irlandini for baritone saxophone and percussion, creates a new relationship between musical and mythical thought, explored also in many of his other compositions since 1988. In this piece, the Vedic myth of Indra slaying the Cosmic Dragon V.tra suggests structuring procedures, instrumental sound sources and sound images, resulting on a congruency between the music and the myth far greater than a simple programmatic relationship. The discussion of some of the compositional processes in this work, as they were suggested by mythical thought, illustrates the composer’s idea of composition as cosmology.

Keywords

• music and myth
• cosmology
• cosmogony
• musical cosmology
• irlandini.