I just went for a very visceral quick response. Because it's abstract, I didn't want to go into too much of the story about how it was made–I wanted it to speak to me on its own terms. And what I love is the angularity of it. That's the flat surfaces and these angles, which are all different from each other, there's no repetition in it, and the way that the colours work with each other.
I have a synesthesia, which means that when I write music or play music, I see colours and so I felt a very strong musical response to the interplay of colours in the boulder. So I incorporated those kinds of colours and textures into the music very directly and made it very angular in places.
When I was writing the text though, I was trying to think of words that would describe this kind of angle. And into my head the word 'polygonical' arrived and I wrote it down in my notebook. Then I thought, this is not a real word, this word does not exist (laughs), I'm reasonably sure. Went to the dictionary and looked it up, and it's not there. If I said that to a linguist, they would say, ah, well it exists now because you made it up. I just felt I wanted to keep the word, even though it doesn't exist.
So they have a little conversation where our lower voices in the ensemble say, there's no such word, but an object of such wonder deserves a magnificent multi-syllabic designation (laughs). I wanted big words because it feels like a big word object. So that's how I approached it, which is kind of abstract I suppose, but it felt right to me–It just brings me great joy.
