vanished time
(2023)

Composer's notes:

I love finding recordings of birdsong online and then using software to slow it down to a fraction of its original speed. In doing so, I like to imagine I am hearing the song as the birds themselves do, birds' hearts and worlds moving so much faster than our own. To write this piece, I slowed down the song of a skylark to 1/8 of its original speed. I then transcribed the song in full. A striking feature was the formal devices at play, which were completely inaudible to humans at full speed. I realised that the song consisted of a series of short motifs which repeated in cycles, until eventually changing to a new cycle. The cycles varied in the number of motifs in use, and in the length and variety of those motifs. Vanished Time comprises two of these cycles, each one forming a single movement. The melodies are my transcriptions of the slowed-down birdsong, reworked into a light, surreal world, where everything is heard with precision and clarity, as I imagine the skylark may hear its own song.

Duration: 12'

Instrumentation: Piano Quintet

First Performance: Sebastian Müller, Annabelle Dugast, Yi.En Hung, Mary Rose Scanlon, Tristan Xavier Köster, 20.06.2024.