Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
A billion suns, a billion moons, a billion rivers, lakes and thundering seas
The world, the abyss, the underworld, time past, time to come,
Everything is born from me, everything returns to me.
— Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Rashmirathi
The Spaces In Between evokes a transitory world with few fixed landmarks. From the opening bars, the listener soon comes to realise they cannot trust what seems to be terra firma. ‘Stable’ intervals such as perfect fifths are subjected to microtonal deformation from the strings, infiltrating the frequency gaps between the piano’s fixed notes. This creates beat frequencies, harmonic tension and an overall sense of instability and impermanence.
In 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Kaikōura (150km from my home in Wellington, New Zealand) created new uplifted coastline formations. Yet we are also subject to increasingly frequent and damaging weather events that erode and wash great swathes of land out to sea. In the Anthropocene, it seems, we get to watch the world change in real time. The Spaces In Between provides a metaphorical response to this unsettling battle between genesis and dissolution: a cosmic interplay of inexorable flux.
This work was commissioned by the Asian Composers League with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for the 37^th^ ACL Festival & Conference in Kawasaki, February 2025. It was premiered by Saori Nakazawa (violin), Koya Suzuki (cello) and Musashi Ishikawa (piano).