When Arthur Rimbaud fled Paris in February 1872, he had, since September 1871, turned the heads of the literary scene surrounding Paul Verlaine, with whom he had entered into a tumultuous relationship. After wanderings, arguments, and ruptures, he wrote Une saison en enfer ("A Season in Hell") in 1873 while staying with his mother and sister in Roche—a series of short lyrical prose texts. The title of my piece for saxophone quartet is drawn from this work: Rimbaud had, in abstract terms, encountered Beauty (Verlaine), found it bitter, and ultimately even wounded.

The restless search for beauty—in the breath of the beloved, in his moans, in his sounds—might also be traced in the quartet’s rushing textures, melodic surges, and instrumental cries. Toward the end, there is a musical homage to my hometown, and finally, a self-quotation: the tragedy of the original double beings, split apart by the Greek gods as punishment and forced into today's gender roles for their forbidden striving toward Olympus, as described in Aristophanes' speech in Plato’s Symposium.