Countdown (2024)

for ensemble (fl.ob.cl.asax.bsn / perc / hp / pno / vn.va.vc.cb)
10′30″
score

chamber large ensemble

Program Note

When I was seven or eight, sleep terrified me. It was not the darkness or the silence—throughout the night, a searchlight whose origin I could never figure out kept a corner of my room well-lit, and frogs croaked loudly in the pond nearby while trucks chugged down the surrounding mountains. What I found increasingly unbearable was the utter boredom, to an extent that I had never experienced before and have rarely experienced since. I would count sheep and superstitiously skip numbers I did not like, but I soon realized there were too many inauspicious numbers to keep track of. I would make up stories to tell myself, until they started to invade my memory, becoming as believable—and thus as tedious—as the searchlight, the frogs, and the trucks. When I was at my wits’ end, I would then start a countdown, gauging the odds of the world ending coinciding with my countdown reaching zero, trying to savor every insipid sensation as a potential last sight, sound, and thought.