Illustrious is an overture that I wrote from November 2021 to February 2022. It is split into four movements: Ill, Lust, Tree, and Us respectively. Get it? Because if you say "ill lust tree us" quickly, then it sounds like "illustrious". The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word illustrious as "notably or brilliantly outstanding because of dignity or achievements or actions". This name was picked out of irony, because the entire piece is about a series of mental processes of anguish. Illustrious was designed to embody a certain distraught feeling of dysphoria. Because the deeper meaning of this song is very personal and sensitive to me, I will only describe a surface-level generalization in my explanations.
Ill conveys the beginning of the realization that one's self is inside of a troubling and negative mental state, and it shows the panic associated with this realization. The arpeggiation, especially after the first chorus, flutters around in warping little bursts of energy - a parallel to the feeling of stress caused through an uncontrollable medium. The wailing CS-80 introduced in the second chorus express the waves of distress creeping onto the shore.
We then switch to the movement Lust, whose name wasn't chosen to mean unbridled sexual desire, but is instead supposed to mean an intense longing. It specifically describes the inability to reach this felicity, and the frustration brought through the very yearning that was supposed to bring joy. The upbeat-focused nature of the song builds the foundation of frenetic anxiety, and the distorted low notes represent the inability to reach the perfection we seek. Halfway through, screaming is introduced in the background to show the frustration through constant trial and error (fun fact: these screams came from the song Mora by Sonny Moore). I tried to incorporate noise as much as possible in this movement, because noise really embodies the feeling I'm looking to represent.
The third movement, Tree, is looking back at the series of events that caused all this stress, but it can't see them quite clearly. It's too caught up in the hectic storm to see outside of the clouds. This is the part where the mind starts racing to all sorts of premature conclusions, blaming who or whatever it's easiest to blame. In an attempt to better understand the cause of the issue, we've only drowned ourselves in judgement and fear.
Us is the final, and longest part of the overture. This time, we take a breath to settle down and figure things out with certainty through a perpetual examination of conscience. What did I do wrong? Is my freewill actually my friend? Are my tears for the better? Who am I? Though we may never come to a solid conclusion at the end of it all, we're better people for trying.