Duration: 5'30"
Instrumentation: Violin, Cello, and Piano
Notes:
Awarded 1st prize in the Beethoven Club 2009 Student Composition Contest
The Circular Ruins is a composition inspired largely by a Jorge Luis Borges story of the same title. The story is about a sorcerer whose sole desire is to create a man in his dreams and impose him upon reality so convincingly that no one will realize he is but a phantom. It is a story of trial, failure, patience, eventual success, and finally humiliation and complete resignation as the sorcerer realizes that he too is the creation of some other manŐs dream, a mere simulacrum.
I tried to evoke these ideas of perseverance and irony, the strange sense of urgency and wonder, and the surprises and mythical imagery found in this story through the use of varied repetition, propulsive rhythms, colorful gestures and textures, and balancing unpredictability with a cogent form. This piece is no doubt my own attempt at manifesting a dreamt creation onto reality, but it leaves me with my fingers crossed, hoping that I am not in fact the dreamt musical creation of some greater composer.
This piece was composed in collaboration with Sasha Gaona of the Indiana University Contemporary Dance Program, who set choreography to the work for five dancers
Listen to excerpt
Listen to full piece (live recording w/ dancers)
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