Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is teaching World History this year, and it has been so fun talking about prehistoric humans.  Particularly, I find Ötzi, a Chalcolithic Age European who died roughly 5000 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps, fascinating.  Two German hikers discovered his mummified remains in the ice in 1991, providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and diet of people in prehistoric Europe.

Ötzi has captured my imagination so much, I composed a lengthy piece depicting his icy trudge through the Alps, and his tragic last hours (an arrow pierced his back, likely killing him).  Upon his death, snow began to fall, preserving Ötzi’s remains in ice for millennia.

I began composing a slow, morose tuba piece, which is only twenty-five measures long on paper and in my composition software:

The slow 6/8 section captures a gloomy-but-whimsical feeling, as one might feel on a frosty trudge through the high mountains.  The 5/8 section speeds up considerably, depicting what may have been Ötzi’s hasty, violent retreat from his attackers.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.