Minutes Between
ensemble string orchestra
written summer 2019
premiered feb. 14 2020 by Jebat Kee, Audrey Maxner, Anna Pavlou, Nicolle Avila, Sarah Jane Thomas, Hanyu Feng, Adam Davis, Amy Tan, Daphne Bickley, Kyle Victor, Zoe Hardel, and Patrick Raynard
duration 11-12 minutes
Runner-Up for One Found Sound’s 2021 Emerging Composer Award
Among my favorite pieces of music is Sibelius’s 6th Symphony. It is an extraordinary work not just for its contrapuntal elegance and formal innovation, but also for its remarkable treatment of time. From its gentle opening, the piece establishes a floating and ethereal soundworld that sounds almost unmeasured, despite its melodic and contrapuntal clarity. This image of well-formed musical objects floating, unimpeded by barlines, laid the groundwork for Minutes Between.
I sought to explore contrasts in the passage of time - slow melodic figurations over fast harmonic rhythms, wild arppeggios embellishing glacial chord changes, entirely unmeasured segments guided purely by musicians’ intuition, rigorously beat passages with sharply defined pulses. At many points, musicians are in entirely different tempi, stretching and playing with materials to create swirling textures at turns and dreamy counterpoint at others. At its heart, though, Minutes Between is guided by a romantic impulse, built as it is out of two main motifs - the soloist’s opening three notes of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, as well as a descending scalar melody. The two intermingle throughout the piece against a persistent harmonic backdrop, recast in roles austere, contemplative, anxious.