Crystal Coyote - for clarinet choir

Year: 2025

Duration: ca. 10:00

Purchase: Coming soon!

Crystal Coyote springs from a concerted effort to reach back to the roots of my work and why I do it. It comes out of a period of several months during which I experienced intense bouts of writer’s block and crippling self-doubt, not long after I earned my Bachelor of Music and was emancipated from academia. These periods of creative difficulty are not new for me, but this one had been particularly long and grueling, and I was anxious to find a way out. One day, seeking solace, I pulled out my copy of one of the first video games I ever played: F-Zero GX for the Nintendo Gamecube. It had been many years since I last played it, and taking another dive into this notoriously difficult, high-octane racing game brought me right back to my youth and reminded me why I love video games so dearly. As I acknowledged this, it occurred to me that my way back into composition might be similar; perhaps if I wanted to be able to compose as joyfully and freely as I did in my early days, I ought to return to my own beginnings and remember what motivated me to write as a young teen. Crystal Coyote, then, is an earnest attempt at diving back into the instinctive, intuitive writing style of my youth, now bolstered by over a decade of experience and theoretical knowledge that I’ve gained since I began composing.

One of my favorite parts of F-Zero GX is that one can build one’s own racing machine from a wide selection of custom parts, and the names of these machines are procedurally generated based on the chosen parts. Crystal Coyote is the name of one such machine, built using the Fire Wolf body, Crystal Egg cockpit, and Euros -01 booster. The idea for this work originally sprang from me coming across this combination, reading the name, and thinking to myself, “ooh—that would make a cool title for a piece”. Each of the work’s two movements focus on other favorite aspects of the game.

Movement I, Mighty Gazelle & The Skull, comes from the game’s rich cast of 41 unique characters, each with their own biographies, racing machines, and even theme music. Mighty Gazelle is a man who was gravely injured in a race and, to preserve his life, had himself turned into a cyborg. He now races without fear of death, knowing that his mostly-machine body can be repaired. The Skull is a man who was born over two centuries ago and whose body has decayed to the point of only being a skeleton but, through mysterious magic powers, has maintained his life and consciousness so that he may continue to race. Both men have such a zealous determination to race that they would defy death—whether through technology or magic—so that they may continue to seek the prestige and honor of winning the F-Zero races.

Movement II, Multiplex, is titled after my favorite racing track in the game. It takes place in an area called Aeropolis, a seemingly endless sea of high rise buildings and futuristic machines far above any visible ground. Multiplex is the final track of the first Grand Prix cup in the game—the hardest track of the easiest tracks—and as a young child with limited skills, I revered it as the pinnacle of video game racing.

Side note: for what it’s worth, while the Crystal Coyote machine has an undoubtedly rad name and serves as the impetus for this work, it’s only a so-so racing machine. That’s just my opinion; the handling is a little too willy-nilly for my own tastes. Experimentation has led me to favor the somewhat-less-cool-named Frost Tusk, made with the Aqua Goose body, the Muscle Gorilla cockpit, and the Saturn -SG booster. You can also pick which of the 41 characters pilots your machine (though this has no impact on anything other than visuals), so the Frost Tusk is piloted by Jody Summer, because I think she’s cool.