Time Traveling Mind (2018)

violin, piano

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Music travels over time, and so do our minds, I thought. They’re like time machines to go back and forth between the past and the future. This idea prompted me to write this piece as a first chamber music composition. This initial concept also has a personal connection because I often think too much about the future that my mind wanders from being in the present. Then, I related this experience to how music can travel over generations of time into the future. Performances live on for music to be passed on into the future from the past.

The two instruments illustrate two separate “timelines” in this piece. The violin has the main melody theme that climbs up in intervals of fifth. It signifies a free wandering mind that travels into the past and future. On the other hand, the piano’s musical gesture embodies reality in the present moment. One section distinctly unifies these two characteristics with a rhythmic interplay over octaves to invoke the ticking of a clock. In the middle, the piece drifts into the imagery of cosmic blackness and a distant universe where gravity and time get obscure. The violin and piano duo in Time Traveling Mind explores the imagination of mind and music as time travelers of space.