50 minutes
2013

Although we don’t tend to think of it this way, hearing the same thing over and over is remarkably common in music. For example, in a tonal context, the descending pitches of scale-degrees 3, 2, and 1, at the end of a phrase is something we hear—within a given piece, and from piece to piece—over and over again. In a classical composition we are likely to hear the main theme, or at least elements of it repeatedly throughout the work. Composers utilize a wide variety of tools to imbue this literal repetition with a sense of newness and progression.

This piece relies on just two elements to introduce the smallest sense of variety in what is otherwise the cyclical repetition of seven distinct musical blocks (ranging from 30 seconds to 2 minutes each). The first is a distinct musical idea that appears in a different place in the order each time these elements are presented. The other is the presence of the piano which briefly enters with entirely unrelated material at four discrete moments across the composition’s 50 minutes. Today, I would most likely simply allow the seven ideas to repeat in order without interruption or variation—something of an imprecise comment, since today I wouldn’t be working with these same musical blocks. At the time, I was interested in finding the least that could be done to bring a shifting perspective to a mostly undifferentiated procession.