Violin duet - Before the Coil of Age Ensnares All Memory (and the Chaos of Light Blinds the Mind)

Click the mp3 button above for an excerpt of the live concert premiere.

The title, Before the Coil of Age Ensnares All Memory (and the Chaos of Light Blinds the Mind), is surely self consciously pompous and tongue-in-cheek. Nonetheless, it relates to the perception, as we grow older, that there is always more to do and less time to do it all. This perception is engineered in this piece through a process of variation upon the initial theme as it continues to grow in number of pitches with each successive treatment while the number of beats is simultaneously reduced. A serious conundrum, to be sure, even as this music mockingly parodies various sonic worlds (such as the sound of an old-fashioned 78 RPM phonograph, a tropical rain forest, a paraphrase of Bartók’s 5th String Quartet, "two ladies at tea", and even music "For the Dogs (with fleas)"). The finale variation is its own set of variations in hocket which reverses the augmentation of the number of pitches back to the original state (but still inexorably continuing the process of temporal diminution!) – we have returned, dust to dust, but Time has moved on.