all moments stop here and together we become every memory...
Ken Ueno
About this work:
“all moments stop here and together we become every memory
that has ever been”
– for 14 instruments and 15 hand-cranked music boxes (2003)
This piece was written for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor.
The title was borrowed from an artwork by Ugo Rondinone.
The spaces between sounds are dramatic for me (“all moments stop here”). But these silences energize me, as a listener, to participate in each forthcoming sound. After the moment of greatest density, we arrive at a ghost of that sound world, as embodied by the delicate complexity of the music boxes en mass.
If you crank a music box very slowly, so that you isolate each note of a melody, the identity of the melody is obscured. This happens even if the melody is one that is universally known (e.g. “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” “Row, row, row your boat,” “Happy Birthday”). It is then possible to experience each note as a sound in itself, rather than as melody. One may also begin to “fill in,” mentally, fleeting references to familiar tunes. Additionally, if we experience a large collection of music boxes playing simultaneously, the melodic identity of each music box is consumed into an aggregate sound. Within this aggregate sound, one can almost “pick out” fragments of melodies, while never completely grasping them. In this piece, I wanted to investigate these perceptual boundaries.
In our daily struggle to maintain our identity in a post-industrial digital world, we are all music boxes, analog songs seeking a space in which to be heard.
Year composed: 2003
Duration: 00:14:30
Ensemble type: Orchestra:Unknown
Instrumentation: ,1 Flute soloist(s), ,1 Oboe soloist(s), ,1 Bass Clarinet soloist(s), ,1 Contrabassoon soloist(s), ,1 Horn in F soloist(s), ,1 Trumpet soloist(s), ,1 Trombone soloist(s), ,1 Percussion (General) soloist(s), ,1 Piano soloist(s), ,2 Violin soloist(s), ,1 Viola soloist(s), ,1 Cello soloist(s), ,1 Double bass soloist(s)
Instrumentation notes: + 15 hand-cranked music boxes.