Glimpses

1986, 1988 | for flute, viola, and guitar

[ score ]

The title of this early piece refers to an intuition I had at the time—mostly accurate, it turns out—that the musical ideas I was beginning to explore here would preoccupy me for years to come. It alludes also to the generally fragmentary presentation of the material. The listener "glimpses" moments of parallel musical narratives, aural images whose incompleteness leaves their possible pasts and futures to the imagination. Much of the material is heard again in new contexts, but it rarely seems the same. With each appearance, it has evolved, not unlike an acquaintance one encounters years later in another place under different circumstances. I imagined these musical ephemera—in the words whispered fleetingly by the guitarist late in the piece—as "points of embarkation on a bankless river.”