Time and its arbitrary measurements

What is music but the shadow of time, or to be more precise, the shadow of a thought splayed out against the canvas of time? If time is the horizon of possibility, then each piece of music is an attempt, however incomplete, to give order and shape to it — to live a life in miniature.

By my lights, to compose music is to weave a continuous thread through a splintered assemblage of memories and half-forgotten qualia, through a winding topography of false starts and fragmentary sounds, of thoughts entertained and discarded — and taken up again — in the hope of rendering them in mythic form. Now, every myth has its monsters, and in this labyrinth of hazy ideas the roaming specter of arbitrariness looms large.

They say it was Ariadne’s thread that enabled Theseus to escape his labyrinth, to abscond with her and in the end, of course, to leave her to die on some desolate island. So, we might want to think twice about the costs of short-sighted coherence. Escaping the grip of arbitrariness, we should be careful not to fall into the hands of the peculiarly arbitrary consistency of musical structure and its hollow claim to rational authority.

I don’t pretend to know the way out of the maze, but this piece is an attempt to fend off all those monsters — or at least to keep them busy for a while.