Mapping the Perfect Maze (IMS Sidequest)

Episode 81-Mapping the Perfect Maze (IMS Sidequest)
Navigating setbacks and distractions
This IMS Sidequest aired September 16, 2025
https://www.shannonheatonmusic.com/episode-81-mapping-the-perfect-maze-ims-sidequest

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[ Music: “Free the Heel,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I’m Shannon Heaton, flute player and host of Irish Music Stories, the show about traditional music. And the bigger stories behind it.

I’ve been working away on an IMS Sidequest called Perfect Maze. It’s a collection of pollinator-inspired compositions for flute, strings, piano, and voice. Recordings and sheet music for the bees and butterflies.

[ “Apian Army” intro, from Perfect Maze

Artist/Composer: Shannon Heaton ]

I’m going to share some of the musical details in this limited series: Mapping the Perfect Maze. But before any stories about melodies, this is really a tale of how despair and delays derailed a huge personal project. And then how leaning IN to darkness and distraction helped me find my way through a maze of old hard drives, notebooks, and ideas.

[ Music: “E Minor Chimes, from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Maybe you have work that you’ve set aside? Maybe you’ve also been knocked off your game to the point of losing motivation, focus, and the desire to resurrect a project? That’s what happened to my Perfect Maze project.

Back in 2016 I had started writing music inspired by bees and butterflies: Apian Army, Tattered Wings. I had some clustery chords, a few fluttering tones, rhythmic structures that mimic the construction of the beehive. Different than my usual traditional material.

I pulled in some great classical collaborators. We started recording the music. I laid out the scores for publication. And then in March 2020 Covid cancelled my final recording session.

[ Music: “Pick and Drive,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Instead of releasing a new album, I jumped into the wild west of online teaching and festivals and live-streaming. I helped my kid with his online school. And the unfinished Perfect Maze recordings sat in a folder on my old laptop. The drafts of scores (with all my pencil marking edits) helped to prop up my makeshift web cam.

Six months in to Operation Online, my computer died. I did this hasty dump of my files onto an external hard drive. I was too busy hooking up replacement gear for the next livestream to double check the Perfect Maze folder. Many gigabytes of unfinished projects. Didn’t feel like a priority.

And then Finale—the program I’ve used for decade to notate all my music—announced they would be discontinuing their software. It felt like a bad omen: the mess of sheet music written on doomed software, the recordings made in different studios, using different programs. Seemed like it was all headed for the bin.

So, it seemed, was America.

[ Music: “Mountain Grooves,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

We were wading through a very un-tranquil election cycle, with one candidate promising to dump public services, international alliances, the Department of Education, millions of immigrants, and environmental protections. My Perfect Maze seemed so very out of touch. With political storms at home and wars overseas, a project in praise of the pollinators seemed like offering a junior-sized bandaid at the site of a plane crash.

I stopped adding Perfect Maze to my to do list.

I also limited my news consumption. I tried to be available and upbeat with my students. I did the laundry. I tried to call my family and friends more. I started learning the new notation software. And I began to accept that the pollinator music project was dead.

[ Music: “Sweetest Blooms,” from Perfect Maze

Artist/Composer: Shannon Heaton ]

Then one winter morning in the woods, I felt something above me. Something dark, shadowy.

Then the cries kicked up. It was a murder of crows, flying down from a tall tree.

The acidic echoes of their calls, the intense flapping. It felt ominous. But after they passed me, I felt deeply calm.

I thought about crows huddling together, foraging for food in the snow to survive.

I thought about how humans endure hardship—how we stay warm and keep the lights on through cold winters. Even through horrific wars.

I thought about how honeybees cluster inside and vibrate their bodies together to generate heat, all working for the good of the colony.

[ Music: “Bow for Rama,” from Perfect Maze

Artist/Composer: Shannon Heaton ]

When I got home that morning I learned more about how bees organize their hives.

And I learned how orange migratory monarch butterflies were named for late 17th century King William of Orange—which is funny, because butterfly survival is a group effort. Some fly completely solo to their winter home in Mexico, which is amazing because it’s really far from New England. Many overlap, and others cluster in huge groups. But in the end, there are no monos arkhes, no sole leaders when they settle in the Oyamel fir forests.

I read about monarchs and monarchies and other types of government… and how in the 4th Century BCE, Aristotle was also thinking about human political animals. How we construct governing systems in order to survive and flourish.

The next time I peeked at news headlines, I considered them with an ecology and a history slant. And I started writing.

[ Music: “Modal Theme,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I wrote stories about tragic heroes and honeybees. I wrote about wars and kings and saints. And about roses and about how lotus flower seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years, until the right team of pollinators help create new plants.

Why was I writing all of this?

I don’t know. But I just kept writing. I weaved current events and characters with creatures and figures from the natural and ancient worlds. And I tangled everything together in a 12 essay anthology. My weird way of processing modern tragedies through an older, wider lens. My way of taking in some of the darkness without being consumed by it. My coping mechanism.

After months of writing I stepped back. I printed out all my essays—I literally printed them and put them in one of those plastic three hole punch folders (I got it out of my kid’s school supplies bin). And then I tucked the bundle on a high bookshelf. It was like that scene in Love Actually, where Mark (who was in love with his best friend’s wife) told her how he feels. And then he walks away and says to himself “Enough. Enough now.”

Well, the essays were done. I was ready to dip my toes back in the Maze. I guess I realized that if I could consider and reframe a few horrible modern and ancient tragedies, I could certainly relocate or reimagine a bit of music.

[ Music: “Meaning of Life,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Bird by bird, I found many of my old tracks. I wrote and recorded a few new ones. I got better at Dorico, the new notation software. And eventually I produced a whole album of music. And I published the scores for players who want to step into my Perfect Maze. It’s all notated and arranged, no Irish music background required to play the music, even if there is a lot of simple system flute DNA in the melodies.

[ Music: “Perfect Maze,” from Perfect Maze

Artist/Composer: Shannon Heaton ]

I look forward to navigating  a few Perfect Maze sounds with this limited podcast series: I’ll dissect some of the structures and musical ideas without having to worry about copyright issues, since I wrote everything.

And as for the essays, I’ll read a few excerpts. But the bigger story for me is the way the writing tangent helped me focus and jumpstart this project. The stories helped the music bloom. Which is very Irish Music Stories… there’s usually more than just a simple melody behind most songs and tunes.

By the time I’ve assembled this IMS Sidequest, the final generation of migratory Monarch butterflies will be emerging in Massachusetts, just in time to begin their exodus to the Oyamel Fir forest in Mexico. That’s where they’ll winter until the sweetest blooms of early spring leap forth again:

[ Music: “Broken Branches,” from Perfect Maze

Artist/Composer: Shannon Heaton ]

I am relieved to be back in the podcasting saddle, after doing all this writing, and muscling through the notation software, and recording all the music. There’s no way I could have found my way through without the support of a few readers and sounding boards. My DEEP thanks to Matt, my mom, Elise, Ceri Rhys, Fawn, Art, Tom, and Tricia for graciously listening to and reading some of my essays.

Thanks, too, to the recent supporters of Irish Music Stories. Thank you,

Amy Pardo

Kim Buchanan

Daniel Ide

Adele Megann

Chris Armstrong

Heather Carroll

Hélène Wehrli

Ian Bittle

Irish & Celtic Music Podcast

Jackson Galloway

John Sigler

Jonathan Duvick

Karin Kettenring

Mike Voss

Paul DeCamp

and Randall Semagin

Thank you for believing in the Irish Music Stories project—and its subsidiary sidequests. I hope you’ll tune in next time for stories and music about Greek tragedies and Aristotle in Spring.

Find this podcast … and order CDs and sheet music… at shannonheatonmusic.com.