Orange County Register

The maestro has always written witty, fanciful program notes. The Johannes String Quartet will give the West Coast premiere of his new work “Homunculus” in Samueli Theater on Nov. 19. Here’s Salonen’s amusing description of it, in full.

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
Born 1958
Homunculus for String Quartet
This work was commissioned for the Johannes String
Quartet by the International Arts Foundation with a
lead gift from Islip Arts Council and Lillian & Maurice
Barbash and contributions from the Orange County
Performing Arts Center, the Philadelphia Chamber
Music Society and Martha and Frank Salomon.

Homunculus is a short (circa 12 minutes)
work for string quartet, which I wrote during
the autumn months of 2007 for the
Johannes Quartet. I wanted to compose a
piece that would be very compact in form
and duration, but still contain many different
characters and textures. In other words,
a little piece that behaves like a big piece.

I have long been fascinated (and amused)
by the arcane spermists’ theory, who held
the belief that the sperm was in fact a “little
man” (homunculus) that was placed inside a
woman for growth into a child. This seemed
to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries
of conception. It was later pointed out
that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical
in all but size to an adult, then the
homunculus may have sperm of its own.
This led to a reductio ad absurdum, with an
endless chain of homunculi. This was not
necessarily considered by spermists a fatal
objection however, as it neatly explained how
it was that “in Adam” all had sinned: the
whole of humanity was already contained in
his loins.

I decided to call my piece Homunculus
despite the obvious weaknesses of the spermists’
thinking, as I find the idea of a perfect
little man strangely moving.
—Esa-Pekka Salonen, January 2008

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