Composer Sam Scranton's Detritivore is an evening length work in five movements for four performers. Central to the work's genesis is the idea developed by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death that culture exists to protect and shield human beings from their own insignificance, contingency, and animal brutality. The sound world that makes up Detritivore is wholly derived from text: solar data tables, astrological charts, personal observation, lifecycle/business-cycle timetables, and meditations on (im)mortality. Though the work is text based, words are coded, performed, and mediated beyond intelligibility. One may catch glimpses of the speech-based network undergirding the whole, but mostly Detritivore is experienced as a ritualized performance at turns chaotic, atmospheric, expansive and claustrophiliac, that exists beyond the total comprehension of composer, performer or audience. The work will be performed by the composer with Bill Frisch, Diedre Huckabay, and Andrew Tham.

$10/8 students & members