Molly the Miraculous Music-Theorist for large orchestra was written in 2017 as a companion piece to the symphonic poem “Die Ideale” (The Ideals) by Franz Liszt, which was first performed by Liszt and the Staatskapelle Weimar at the unveiling of the Goethe and Schiller monument at the Weimar Theaterplatz in 1857.
The Liszt piece is inspired by passages from the poem of the same name by Friedrich Schiller, and in turn by the classical ideal of beauty and a depiction of the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion pertaining to the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he carved of a beautiful woman. Similarly Philip Armstrong's piece looks to Schiller's theory of artistic taste and freedom as presented in his “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man), written in 1794.
Play-drive
Building on the work of Immanuel Kant, Schiller developed the concept of a play-drive (spieltrieb) whereby human mental capacities are able to combine seemingly antithetical opposites such as reason and aesthetic sensibilities, the necessary and the contingent, the empiricism of the Hume tradition and the rationalism of the Leibniz tradition, into one. This play-drive empowers the freedom of human agency to act as the unifying intermediary between the phenomenal experience of beauty and deliberative acts of morality.