Broken Archipelago and Return

Price :$5

Duration: 15 Minutes

Type: String quartet with double bass

Produced at: American premiere: Mandeville Center, UCSD, Sans Diego

Description:

'Broken Archipelago and Return' is made up of this systematic opposition of two main currents whose activity varies periodically: one is more continuous, evoking the idea of stability, and the other fragmented, its opposite. In reality, no change occurs unless it has already been initiated, so each of the continuous sections essentially carries its own deterioration. As a result, the progressive accumulation of corrosive layers reaches several levels of saturation, shattering and pulverising in space-time, breaking into multiple parts. But a decisive break in this continuous flow never really occurs. Only a slow and inevitable erosion, with moments of stability reappearing and diminishing as they resist less the pressure of chaotic forces. A microcosm of our universe, illustrating one perception of time. Eventually these moments disappear and are gradually replaced by a succession of chaotic events. Repetition is no longer simply unpredictable, but the source of a new order.

The piece ends in a different direction, demonstrating that space ceases to be isotopic when the preferred direction results from the chance of instability. Bergson, in his work L'évolution créative, put it this way: "In general, when the same object appears, in one aspect as simple as in another infinitely more complex, the two aspects have by no means the same importance or rather the same degree of reality. In such situations, the simplicity belongs to the object itself and the infinite complexity to the views we take when we turn around it, to the symbols by which our senses or our intellect represent it to us, or, more generally still, to the principle of a different order, which we try to imitate artificially, but according to which it remains measurable, and leads to a different nature"