50 minutes
2007

Subsequent to the completion of my work for flute, violin, piano, percussion, and string quartet from 2007, I experienced a kind of liberation. As if stepping through a doorway into a new and much larger space, I had a fresh sense of what was possible in terms of the direct experience of sound when that experience is calibrated over an extended span of time. This work for alto flute and percussion resonates in that space. The kinds of subtle gradations explored in previous compositions are now placed under the microscope—of deep significance, for example, is the difference between a vibrato and a non-vibrato sound, a whole note and a dotted whole note. At various points, the percussionist explores a single sound for anywhere from 45 to 90 seconds—a notion that reaches a kind of apogee in the four-minute stretch of my solo violin piece from 2018 where the violinist softly rings an assortment of tiny bells hung from a string.