The Difference Between Timeless and Stationary

Written in 2020 and the re-written in 2024 for piano and string quartet (45 minutes)

Recording Coming Soon!

The Difference Between Timeless and Stationary is about 45 – 50 minutes in 6 movements, but the second half of the piece does not have pauses between movements.

The Difference Between Timeless and Stationary was started in the summer of 2020 during COVID lockdowns and otherwise relative isolation. I don't entirely remember the impetus for getting this piece off the ground, but I started writing material while imagining a sort of floaty, long form composition that I might perform with some of my friends – whenever that might be possible. At the time I was really interested in the relationship between visual art and music, and I had started exploring ideas such as collage and montage, especially thinking about cubism and how 3D images are represented from multiple angles at the same time in 2D space.

That was fun, but I had other things on my mind – not least of which was the end of the world happening around us. I’m not quite sure what happened, but after sketching out a lot of the material, making plans that never came to fruition and trying to mock-up sections of the piece in a DAW (which was horrible), I shelved the piece. Around the same time, I received a commission to compose an album for the Another Timbre label to be recorded by Apartment House – my favorite label with one of my all-time favorite ensembles. That album, Codex Vivere, actually contains a lot of the structural elements buried in The Difference Between Timeless and Stationary, so the work I had done wasn’t a total loss, but the piece stayed tabled for years.

Fast forward to 2023, Mark Vaughn is teaching at Greyson College, and we had a conversation about possibly doing a show in Dennison. I wasn’t quite sure what to do for a concert, but by coincidence I had just cleaned out my office closet and found all the materials for The Difference Between Timeless and Stationary (with the title “Long-Ass Quintet” written on the top page). Wondering if I still had the files on a hard drive, I decided to dive back into the piece and see what I had. There are a lot of differences between that manuscript edition and the version of the piece you’ll hear now. The first version was much sparser and more silent, much more austere, and perhaps even severe – but there was a lot to get out of it and a lot to explore.

I’m still interested in the relationship between painting and music – and I really think this piece has a collage and montage quality to it – but also very interested in dreams, memory, and nostalgia and how those emotions can transport us somewhere else. At the same time, I’ve grown more and more interested in in place and music. How can our homes inform what our music sounds like? How can music take you somewhere? I am from Nebraska, and while I can’t be sure that my music reflects that landscape, I think there are qualities in the music you will hear that are reflected in the landscape of my home. How can dream-logic and non sequitur inform music but still have some cohesion.

At the end of the day, I think this piece is rather abstract – a daydream of somewhere or some other time and place. I invite you to daydream while we play this piece, perhaps it takes you somewhere else too.