Browsing by Author "Ratliff, Phillip Warren"
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Item Signposts in a Strange Land. (Original composition); (Walker Percy)(1994) Ratliff, Phillip Warren; Milburn, EllsworthSignposts in a Strange Land is a work for string quartet inspired by native Alabama author Walker Percy. Percy's humorously existential novels usually center around a character living with a sense of loss of identity and moral direction; a Southerner trapped in the basement of a New York department store and a real estate agent searching for the meaning of life in the movie houses of New Orleans are two such characters. The String Quartet captures the searching, groping quality inherent in Percy's characters, and like these characters, culminates in moments of revelation and self-definition.Item The Howling Infinite. (Original composition);(1995) Ratliff, Phillip Warren; Milburn, EllsworthThe Howling Infinite is an orchestral work inspired by portions of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Musical motives, gestures, and timbres in the work are derived from the text's rich imagery, suggesting such pictorial elements as the vastness of the ocean and the corresponding philosophical idea of the human spirit's search for the eternal. The title of the work was derived from Melville's belief that a life based on the contemplative search for truth and meaning, though it takes the seeker into confrontation with perilous truths, is by far more desirable than an existence of spiritual comfort and complacency. As Melville states, "so better it is to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee."