Misprints is influenced by the third cantos from a novel written by Nabokov called Pale Fire, a literary work that is part poetry and part prose. In the third cantos, the character John Shade has a near death experience and sees a “tall white fountain.” He later reads in a magazine about a woman who came close to death, also claiming to have seen a “tall white fountain,” but soon comes to discover that the woman’s account in the magazine was a misprint, learning that in actuality the woman saw a “tall white mountain.”

If a question is translated into a different language, words sometimes are misprinted and change meaning, yet the question still retains the understanding that it is a question. Therefore, if a Bach cello suite is played on viola, does it still ascribe to the same meaning? This implies that rather than text (sound source), just like the words mountain and fountain, texture (sound qualities) plays more of a significance.

This piece is conceived using string sounds to emulate the different worlds of poem and prose. In Misprints, I attempt to sonically resemble the contrast between poetic and prose structures in terms of having music material phrased as a pseudo-poem that resolves as well as abruptly changes to different environments, versus music material phrased as proses, which sonically resemble a continuous flow of iterations. The iterations of string sounds become less apparent to their sources and dissolve into a texture of gestalt spaces. As the piece progresses, the flow is interrupted by a constant change of different sound environments with delayed reverbs imitating sounds of the cinema, in which case the cinema is a misprint of reality. Both poem and prose become “textures interlinked” to develop a “web of senses.”