"This Invisible World" for flute and piano

Carl Witt: "This Invisible World" for flute and piano was written around 2010-2011 and dedicated to the blind. It was specifically commissioned by the international flute soloist Wissam Boustany. Boustany actively approached the American composer and fellow flutist Carl Witt to craft a work that could serve as both a complex musical exploration and a advocacy tool. Both Carl Witt and Wissam Boustany shared a deep fascination with the sensory mechanics of visual impairment. Specifically, they wanted to honor the unique capacity of blind individuals to discover profound inner meanings, structures, and textures that remain completely abstract or "invisible" to the sighted world.
The piece was intentionally adopted by Boustany to act as a major flagship catalyst for his global charity initiative, Towards Humanity. A portion of the proceeds from the project's tracking and album distribution directly benefits organizations supporting the blind and visual wellness, such as the SOS Children's Villages UK.
Musically, the composition is an exercise in translating purely tactile and atmospheric spatial awareness into an auditory journey. The composition relies heavily on a post-minimalist structural blueprint. It begins softly, constructing a sonic architecture out of a single short, recurring melodic motif. As the piece moves forward, Witt manipulates the flute and piano registers to create multi-layered acoustic environments—evoking an "aura of unseen beauty" where sound wave physicalities must literally be heard to be felt. The score gradually increases in sheer dynamic intensity and rhythmic urgency before pivoting into an intensely calm, deeply reflective movement of ultimate quietude. This dynamic arc simulates the process of retreating from external chaos into the rich, vast universe of the human mind.
True to Boustany and Szram’s signature performance standard, this piece (which spans 14 minutes and 28 seconds) is traditionally performed completely from memory, heightening the raw, sensory reliance on acoustic feedback and touch.