Instrumentation: clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass
First Performance: 10 March, 2013, by the Scharoun Ensemble, conducted by Anthony Cheung. Villa Aurelia, American Academy in Rome.
Duration: 12 minutes
Excerpts from the premiere, with the Scharoun Ensemble conducted by Anthony Cheung:
We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
With this famous conclusion drawn by James Hutton in 1788, modern geology took a decisive break from a linear narrative, and human history became disentangled from the geological record. Uniformitarian processes that have always existed will continue to do so, forming an unending chain of cyclical time. To paraphrase the opening lines of Eliot's Four Quartets, past and future are always present - in the present.
I'd like to think of this piece as representing some of the ways in which metaphors drawn from geological "deep time" and cycles of time can be made heard. There are never strict processes, and they do not repeat. Moments of directionality are followed by stasis, only to start up again. This is especially so in the first section, which gradually transforms a static structure with elements of "ceaseless motion" bubbling under the surface into a more active foreground texture. The final section of the piece is another slow transformation, in which the strings literally erode their tunings into new, strange forms.
Anthony Cheung
March 2013
“Yet one piece retains its even more beguiling mystery: Time’s Vestiges, for nine players. This, in twelve minutes or so, irregularly, executes a sweep from low to high – an arrow of time, within which there are many smaller arrows, cycles, and cycles on cycles. At the beginning, soloists take turns with a four-note shape not unrelated to that of Assumed Roles. Time is slow and sticky here, and the instruments need effort to extricate themselves. There follows a sequence of episodes gradually taking over from one another: an imaginary ocean of wavelets and sprays, a multi-instrument staccato pattering, a wonderful horn solo, and finally a crushed harmony of retuned strings in continuous ascent as the piano takes steps in the same direction. Haunting and memorable.”