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surrounded by distance (for fourteen players)

Surrounded by Distance is an investigation of the compositional potential of treating the ‘present moment as an infinite dream’, which I have been exploring since the late 90s. Concerned with the paradoxes arising from our common sense idea of time as consisting of a stream of discreet moments of awareness, which on closer inspection are in fact dimensionless (cf. Heraclitus, St Augustine, Schopenhauer, Borges...), I have attempted to explore how meditative absorption on the ‘musical moment’ could broaden my understanding of the relation of the large-scale structure to its parts.

In Surrounded by Distance this exploration resulted in a seamless form, the very opposite of the formal mosaic of my Tigres Azules (2003) for a similar ensemble. On this occasion I was drawn to exploring the indefinable, yet seemingly precise manner in which musical shapes and configurations arise spontaneously as evocative appearances and illusory continuities (cf. the Lankavatara Sutra, ch. 2 (25), trans. D.T. Suzuki).

The result takes the form of sequences of musical phrases and figures (articulated largely in the highest register of the ensemble by a pair of flutes, three violins, viola, glockenspiel and celesta), which dissolve leaving no traces. In this sense I would describe Surrounded by Distance as a display of magical appearances unfolding over a harmonically static background provided by a pair of clarinets, horn, harp, marimba and lower strings. Towards the end of the piece, many of the figures that made up the first section re-emerge unchanged but in closer proximity to each other, somehow conveying a sense of simultaneously belonging to a vanishing present and an inaccessible past.