Project: Pure leaf or leap, for 14 musicians (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, percussion, 2 violins, viola, violoncello, double bass).  The work features the clarinet in a central role.  Duration: 20 minutes.  Pure Leaf or Leap champions a sense of magic, both in its material (auditory illusions and captivating auditory characters with illusory qualities) and in its assembly, which relies heavily upon metamorphosis and a dream-like stream of consciousness.  The foreground material consists of contrasting characters with strong identities capable of holding attention in the same manner as a semantic object, but without explicit semantic reference.  A large part of what lends identity to these objects is a certain degree of perceptual ambiguity, such as ambiguity between harmony and timbre, or between pitch and noise.  The background material relies even more heavily on perceptual ambiguity, and specifically on the use of well-known auditory illusions.  The foreground characters, embedded in this magical environment, revel in it and draw energy from it.  The form of the work owes much to the surrealist philosophy of André Breton, and to more recent advances in the understanding of the subconscious and dream.  A fluid, refracted construction emulates the unpredictable subconscious.  Articulations and metamorphoses are unexpected.  Juxtaposition predominates over comparison.  As in the unconscious mind, the strength of the imagery comes more from the images themselves, and less from their syntactic relationships.  A primary goal of the project was the reinforcement of the magnetic attraction between the audience and the music (achieved not through a universally understood musical language, but through an understanding of universal perceptual principles).  A related goal, the injection of a sense of power into the genre of spectral music, led to a dynamic discourse that exploits rhythmic virtuosity while preserving the subtlety of illusion developed by the spectralists.