As said in the title explanation, this piece is both a Fracture piece and a BABEL piece. The Fracture aspect of the piece is primarily expressed in the sharp "channel change" shifts between sections, styles and genres. It also contains an even more substantial than usual appearance by that old stand-by, my "Chrysalis melody". The fractured structure is also appropriate to the BABEL aspect of the composition. Like all such pieces, it's divided into five sections, each of which characterized by a different musical "language".

The first section of the piece was initially composed using Ancient Greek musical notation (shown in the score next to the more standard notation), and generally features simple rhythms as a result. However, the metrical structure is more protean, as is the often microtonal pitch content. The details are beyond this scope of this description I suppose, but very generally: Ancient Greek music was apparently organized around certain set anchor pitches (generally a fourth apart) connected by variable connecting pitches. Sometimes the connections were similar to our diatonic scale (marked διατ in the score), sometimes more like our chromatic scale (marked χρωμ). In fact, those terms survive to this day from the original Greek usage. The most interesting connection to me, though, is the one they called "enharmonic" (marked εναρ), which uses very close together, microtonal pitches that are in between the keys of a piano.

The upshot of all of that crap that you probably don't care about is that the crazy, messy dissonance you're hearing which sounds like we're playing very badly out of tune is actually a result of the clash between instruments playing the same melodies but using these different "genera". So, for example, the very beginning of this piece has the cello playing the melody in the enharmonic form, but it is joined first by the violin using the chromatic form and then by the accordion using the diatonic. Sounds kind of crazy, yeah? I can't explain why this causes me pleasure, but try to run with it.

So anyway, if you're still listening past this opening Greek section, you're rewarded with a far less cold cello solo which marks the beginning of the second section. Just as the Greek letters at the beginning of the title signified the Greek genesis of the first section, the German letters of the second letter signify a move to serialism. However, the Greek spirit of the first section is still partially present in that the tone row uses four notes from each of the three genera (3 × 4 = 12!). This section is relatively brief and culminates in the building of a chord using all of the notes in the row.

When this chord suddenly stops, a quiet flute melody is revealed, playing my idée fixe Chrysalis melody with quiet accordion accompaniment. This is the third section of the BABEL piece, offering Romanticism as the third musical "language." Thanks Andrea La Rose and Kamala Sankaram for playin' so purty!

That section functions as a mirror in the middle of the work, and the final two sections are twisted reflections of the first two. The fourth section is serial and uses the same tone row as the second section, but this time in retrograde versions. Just as the second section began with a cello solo, this section ends with a violin solo, striving nobly to resurrect the melody of the center. However, it is painfully interrupted by not one, but two trombones blaring out the beginning of the fifth section, a mutated version of the first section using the same Ancient Greek musical notation and the same painful juxtaposition of microtonally disjointed notes.

WARNING: PLEASE SKIP TO THE FINAL PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ A BUNCH OF SHIT USING BIG GREEK WORDS MEANINGLESS TO ANYONE THAT HASN'T STUDIED ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC. The final grand gesture of the piece is an almost-unison, upward statement of the entire Greater Perfect System (scale) of the Ancient Greeks in which both the diezeugmenon and synemmenon branches unfold simultaneously.

The final grand gesture of the piece is a nasty upward scale that gets increasingly unruly and bifurcated on it's way to the final high note that conludes the piece.