Gulliver’s Travels

Maxime Aulio composed Gulliver’s Travels for the concert band of the Conservatoire National de Région in Toulouse (France) conducted by Jean-Guy Olive. The first performance took place in Toulouse (Auditorium Saint-Pierre des Cuisines) on April 25, 2001.

Around 1720, when the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) let the ship surgeon Lemuel Gulliver set sail for the first of his four fascinating world travels, he was certainly not trying to write a simple entertaining fiction, but rather a sharp and coruscating satire on vanity, morals, and mankind’s hypocrisy.

Utopia as a literary genre was at that time the only means of eluding censorship. In his writing of these adventures, which took him about six years, Swift had enough time to nurture his ideas so that his trenchant portrait of human condition is still valid today. The creative storyline, clear writing, and subtlety of Gulliver’s Travels have been engaging readers for generations. This literary travel between reason and foolishness has also appealed to Maxime Aulio’s imagination. Each of the four movements of this suite is a review of Gulliver’s peregrinations, resembling the effect of a kaleidoscope, which juxtaposes small fragments of color in a linear pattern.