at eventide

o schöne Zeit

It goes without saying nowadays, at least among good company, that the fundamental characteristic of all music, regardless of genre or quality, is its existence within time. Despite appearing self-evident, it remains important to consider the consequences of such a thought; moreover to pose the question of its relevance to our lives, in which we are constantly running out of time. This lack experienced in daily life is foreboding; deadlines, working hours, mortality. music offers a different view: in a concert, or whenever fully committed to hearing, one ‘has all the time in the world.’ That is, one experiences duration as such regardless of the attention or lack thereof to the work; at the very least, one sits and does nothing for a particular timespan. This is not simply an aesthetic stance, it is also a political one; to sit and do nothing ‘productive’ is radically against economic systems of control and precarity as well as the widespread culture of productive optimization which currently has a stranglehold on our lives. one steals back his own vital time from economic exploitation when one listens to music. I take it therefore as my political and ethical duty as a composer to create such a situation for the listener so that they can perceive and retake time in this way. form and scale are then by logical conclusion a thousandfold more meaningful than style, material, or content whereby the act of observing time’s passage is the most emancipatory.

o Abendstunde

I began writing at eventide in January 2025. I had wanted for a while to depart from the heavy, bare-bones, obviously linear processes of my music from the years before. That type of austerity was something I did not wish for the listener; I did not want the experience of hearing my pieces to become laborious. I myself longed to hear lightness, thinness, transparency, movement. After some successful experiments with this in 2024, I set out to try this in a ‘long piece’.

The ‘long piece’ of the 21st century is often characterized, or caricatured, as being static, resonant, and immersive. at eventide is none of these. My music doesn’t meditate or do yoga. The linear process which used to rule my work sits here in the background, serving simply as a field of possibilities or attributes, which in turn allow for more openness from which an impression of phrasing emerges. Despite the lack of virtuosity, the piece is nimble, using a faster tempo than I previously would trust myself to write.

Much of the piece uses the pedal very sparingly. With less pedal, one can hear each tone with its own particular luminosity and its own particular decay. with the pedal, the sound is too large, and the particularity of each sound becomes lost in the virtual space of sympathetic resonance. In this reduced, muted sound, other phenomena emerge- phantoms of combination tones, noises from the movement of the keys themselves, and melodic shadows- ‘negatives’ which emerge only from the releasing of keys.

o heilsames, köstliches Angedenken

Memory is the medium through which one senses the passing of time. Without memory there is only the present, the ‘contemporary’ and therefore only disorientation. A future cannot be conceived without the possibility of the present becoming memory. Without repetition there is no memory, as there is no recognition of what is past. Repetition is the medium through which one senses the passage of musical time. Repetition happens on small scales as well large ones. There can never be a real repetition, as the perception of what is repeated changes with the knowledge of its repetition. Repetition on a large scale (entire sections) manifests a horizontal harmony: rhyme. at eventide remembers itself.

The headings for each of these text fragments are taken from the cadences in the 64th movement of Bach’s Matthäuspassion, the recitativo accompagnato “Am Abend da es kühle war.” The American modernist poet Louis Zukofsky repeatedly quotes the passion in his life-long poem ‘A’. In “A6” he refers to the first line of this recitativo in translation: “at eventide.” On the same page, he poses the question: “can / the design / of the fugue / be transferred to / poetry?” With my music i ask the opposite; I want to know if music can still bear the time of poetry.