After a season filled with musical variety, what are some of the common threads in the patchwork we’ve assembled? In this episode, Mary Claire Murphy shares a collage of memorable insights from the participating composers, illuminating human connection through art.

Through this Patchwork Suite, we’ve pored over ten independent variations on a poetic waltz by Enrique Granados. In this episode, we enjoy the original theme and all its contemporary variations back-to-back as a complete suite, so as to trace all the colorful waltz transformations in our musical tapestry.

Patchwork Suite host Mary Claire Murphy shares her own variation on the Poetic Waltz by Enrique Granados. Based on a slapstick-style family home video, she gives the theme a ragtime makeover with help from the ragtime king, Scott Joplin. Her variation "Jacob’s Caper" is a tribute to her younger brother and all his humor, resilience, and zest for life.

Steven Naylor, a Michigan-raised pianist and composer, leaned into the fiber arts connection of this podcast by writing a piano solo with a three-part structure based on crochet technique. His variation on the Granados waltz, titled “Slipknot, Stitches, and Bind-Off,” offers a delightfully tactile experience with optional extended techniques.

Joshua DeLozier, a Patchwork Suite guest from Texas, discusses the subtleties of his mathematical approach to musical transformation. With a geometric design in mind, he built his variation on a three-note extraction from the Granados waltz theme and then quickly expanded it by means of pitch, rhythm, and register.

Experimental composer Ka Hei Cheng grew up in Hong Kong and, in her works, espouses a deep listening approach that was developed substantially by Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016). Through deep listening, we enter into Ka Hei’s electronic variation on the Granados waltz theme and accept her invitation into this dance of the senses as ambient layers unfold all around us in space.

Originally from North Carolina, composer Indigo Knecht incorporates various beach and natural sounds into their electroacoustic variation on the Granados waltz theme. It’s also a treasure trove of toy sound effects, suggesting their memories of an old baby blanket and childhood hardships. They describe how those memories affected their treatment of the theme, which becomes distorted beyond recognition.

Toledo composer and teacher Jay Welenc re-harmonizes and orchestrates the Granados waltz theme to depict the adventures and perils of maritime life, symbolized in this episode by a sailcloth. He conducts a performance by his students at Toledo School for the Arts.

Cleveland-based composer Meredith Gulla uses a three-note snippet of the Granados waltz theme to craft a piano solo based on the cloud-like softness of her high school prom dress, a symbol of adulthood. She takes us through a series of rhapsodic musical episodes, akin to flashbacks from her youth, styled in a way that’s sometimes whimsical, other times earnest, and heartwarming throughout.

Wisconsin artist Stephen Deeter is a composer, a vocalist, and a lyricist too. His poem “Secondhand” traces his musings on what it means to love and be loved, taking inspiration from both a thrift-shop quilt and from his relationship with his partner. In Stephen’s variation on the Granados waltz theme, he sets “Secondhand” to music by playing with the melodic contour of the original theme and supporting the text with modern-minded harmony.