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“I have realised that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” Alan Watts
We think of a single moment as something small, but somehow, it contains the whole world in it. Everything we’ve ever seen, heard, thought, felt, is brought to bear upon it, and countered by the influx of our senses. And the light of the furthest stars is thousands of years old by the time we see it. If you could slice out a single moment, like a sort of cross-section of time, what great complexity of ingredients would it hold?
This piece is an imaginary study of such a cross-section: a moment of great joy, folded out and dissected. In the middle somewhere, happiness, hope, ecstasy. But also, lurking at the perimeter, the memory of suffering that makes joy possible; and the knowledge that it won’t yield to your grasp.
Chris Perren on A Luminous Moment, Unfolded (2017)
Learn more about A Luminous Moment, Unfolded, and Chris's creative process and challenges.
- What inspired you to compose your piece specifically on?
This is a piece about the experience of joy, and what a single moment of pure joy hides within itself.
Perhaps best explained in the program note:
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” - Alan Watts
We think of a single moment as something small, but somehow, it contains the whole world in it. Everything we’ve ever seen, heard, thought, felt, is brought to bear upon it, and countered by the influx of our senses. And the light of the furthest stars is thousands of years old by the time we see it. If you could slice out a single moment, like a sort of cross-section of time, what great complexity of ingredients would it hold?
This piece is an imaginary study of such a cross-section: a moment of great joy, folded out and dissected. In the middle somewhere, happiness, hope, ecstasy. But also, lurking at the perimeter, the memory of suffering that makes joy possible; and the knowledge that it won't yield to your grasp.
In the tradition of the string quartet format, the piece distils the essence of the composer’s unique voice; in it can be heard the push and pull of polyrhythm, precarious metric modulations, lush pandiatonic harmony with few moments of true resolution, and a motoric sense of movement.
Its single movement is divided into sections, each named as a moment along an abstract journey through an exploded single moment:
The brightest of lights
scattered throughout the universe
in effortless gestures.
From a great stillness
emerge glittering fragments
leading you home.
- How would you describe your creative process?
Like a lot of my works, A Luminous Moment, Unfolded is based around a very small motif – just an ascending four-note figure – which acts as a seed from which the rest of the piece is grown.
When I compose, it’s important to me to play with the ideas in a range of different ways. I want to make sure that I’m not just sitting looking at bars on a computer screen. So I’ll pick up a guitar, a pencil and paper, a violin, sit at the piano, or use different software, to see where the ideas want to go on those different tools. Each makes different kinds of possibilities visible. This helps me to get a broader view of the potential directions the piece can take, the different ways ideas could evolve.
Around the time I wrote this, my process was changing a little too. Over a few years, I became much more focused on generating huge amounts of material, and much more ruthless in selecting what material actually made it into the piece. And these days I have a sort of benchmark that if I’m going to write a good piece of music, then at least half of what I come up with should end up in the bin! So this piece is very much like that – it is as much a result of what went out as what went into it.
- What would you consider the most challenging aspect of creating your piece?
It’s very important to me that my music is enjoyable for musicians to play. I try hard to make sure that nothing is exceedingly difficult to play unless there is a real worthwhile musical payoff. And this being a piece about joy, I didn’t think it would be fitting for the musicians to be having a terrible time!
I am not a string player myself, so sometimes achieving that can be hard, because it’s not always obvious to me what is going to be hard to execute or frustrating to read. I have been really lucky to work with the string players in my group Nonsemble very closely over the past decade, and this has been the best possible education in how to write playable music for strings, and also how to notate it in a transparent way. So this piece benefits very much from their guidance over the years.
My way of thinking about composition is that at the end of the day, whatever reaches the listeners’ ears is the composition. It doesn’t matter what my intentions are or how I wanted it to sound. So thinking of things that way, it motivates me to realise musical ideas in the most ensemble-friendly way I can, which can be challenging, but can also be a really satisfying problem-solving process.
- What would you like your listeners to take away from your piece?
A Luminous Moment, Unfolded is a piece of music for listeners to inhabit and experience in a very intimate way, I think. I really enjoy this idea that enfolded within any moment of pure joy is a counterpoint of sadness and suffering, and that far from taking away from it, it is actually what makes it possible, in a yin/yang sort of sense. So I hope the work captures that for listeners, without ever overwhelming the sense of hope, beauty, and happiness that is at its core.
