Earlier in June, I gave the world premiere performance of my illustrations of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with the Hutchins Consort. Together, we performed the entire set of concerti: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, totaling forty minutes of new live animated landscapes, flora, and fauna.

I created a loose story structure for each of the Seasons that paralleled the original sonnets that Vivaldi wrote to accompany his musical masterpiece. I gave each season its own primary color: green for Spring, yellow for Summer, amber for Autumn, and blue for Winter. As with my other Spontaneous Fantasia compositions, I embrace the possibilities of real-time, straight-ahead, don’t-look-back world creation. Performing again with the Hutchins Consort was a treat. They bring joy and enthusiasm to whatever they play. We’re planning public performances of The Four Seasons in the coming months, so look for announcements soon!

It was an ambitious project for me to create so much material for the June 11 private event. However, this all dovetails with the direction I’ve been working on. The core methods of Spontaneous Fantasia revolve around real-time creation. but the complexities of three-dimensional animated structures requires a fair amount of planning and pre-production. The more that I can streamline the planning process, the more I can defer decisions to performance time — which leads to more improvisatory freedom. That’s why I spend a bulk of my time inventing, developing, and tweaking techniques and interfaces to allow me to produce with this kind of facility. That’s where the research happens!