This DCist is always surprised to learn the strange stories behind how artists inspire one another. In 1957, Philip K. Dick published a novel called Eye in the Sky. Years later, composer Robert Dick, no relation to the author, wrote a hallucinogenic and extremely difficult piece for solo flute that takes its name and subject matter from that novel. As previewed in this week’s Classical Music Agenda, we heard the composer himself, who teaches at New York University, play this unusual work as part of the first concert of the French-American Contemporary Music Festival at the embassy of France, La Maison Française. As the composer explained before his performance, the novel is about “an interstellar journey” (a lab accident transports the characters into an alternate world) where, although separated from all humanity, there is still a sense of connection with others. Playing alone on a large J-shaped open-hole alto flute (the instrument shown here), he created an entire cosmic sound world: blowing through the instrument to make a wind effect, humming simultaneously to create harmonies, overblowing for overtone sounds. This arresting music, created while he was in residence at IRCAM (Pierre Boulez’s contemporary music center in the Centre Pompidou in Paris) could work very well as the soundtrack for the next Alien movie. After the concert, over a glass of wine, we learned from the composer himself that he plays the work differently every time, rather than being bound to a single notated version.