Causton: The Persistence of Memory

Description

This piece has its origins in two diverse sources: the painting by Dali from which the title is derived, and a strange memory from my visit to India five years ago.

Whilst staying in a small town near Bangalore, I became ill and had to remain in bed for several days. During the nights, one could hear the hour struck independently from several directions in seemingly random polyrhythms. I came to believe that the sound was made by workers who sat on the rooftops of factories nightly, telling the town what the time was by banging on slates and pieces of metal. in my delirious, half-waking state, it often seemed that time had atrophied, or even changed direction; frequently it seemed that four o'clock in the morning had come before two, and these weird temporal disturbances became absorbed and gathered into my dreams and fantasies.

These ideas affect the piece in more or less direct ways. Tempi are sometimes at odds with other rhythms in the music, pulses appear and disappear, and near the end a single chord buckles and distorts under the strain as its constituent notes are forced out of tune.

© Richard Causton, 1995