Premiere: Rice University Composers Forum, Houston, TX, April 12th, 2016

 

Duration:  ca. 10 min

 

Program Note and Text:

 

"Imagine time as a river, and that we are flying high above it in an aeroplane. Far below you can just make out the mountain caves of the mammoth-hunters, and the steppes where the first cereals grew. Those distant dots are the pyramids and the tower of Babel. … but in front of us there is nothing but mist, mist that is dense and impenetrable. … Now let us quickly drop down in our plane towards the river. From close up, we can see it is a real river, with rippling waves like the sea. A strong wing is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising and then vanishing with each wave. For a brief instant they are lifted on the wave’s crest and then they sink down and are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around us, and before we know it, we vanish again. And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave.”

      -E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World (1936)