In 1996, I walked the pilgrimage to Compostela across France and Spain. During these months, I conceived of a series of works that could musically enact the slow transformations of the individual that experience creates.

Vaclav Schasek, was a Czech polyglot who was a member, along with lutenists, jugglers, men at arms and an ape, of the retinue accompanying the Bohemian noble Leo of Rozmital on his 1465 journey to visit the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the cathedral of Saint James in Northwestern Spain and all principalities of Europe. While ostensibly a pilgrimage, Schasek's chronicles suggest that another goal of the journey was to gain support among the European nobility for Rozmital's brother-in-law, the recently excommunicated King of Bohemia. During the journey the group endured hardship and disease before returning to Prague in 1467. Little is known of Schasek's life beyond what their chronicles tell. Schasek appears to have been a bon vivant a good wrestler. On the group's safe return to Bohemia, Schasek was knighted.