Program Notes:

While composing Like a Whirling Sand Clock for clarinet, cello, and piano, I was preoccupied with the concept of time as a leaking process, mirroring a larger phenomenon best described as a regression in time. In September 2006, I sensed that the world stood at a pivotal moment: on one hand, various religious and political forces sought deeper roots in what they perceived as absolute truth, yet these ideas, particularly religious ones, were profoundly fundamentalist, reactionary, and narrow-minded.

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For me, these clashes of ideas and ideals echoed the dark days of the Middle Ages and the Crusades, when people were killed in the name of blind belief. Today, with humanity's sophisticated mass destruction tools, one wonders where we are headed and what tomorrow will bring.

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The sensation of time slipping away intensified as contemporary events increasingly resembled narratives from history books. I envisioned a perpetually whirling sand clock, dropping grains of sand one by one into the upper tube rather than the lower one—a visual metaphor for the process of regressing in time, which I aimed to depict through sound.

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Like a Whirling Sand Clock was generously commissioned in memory of Adele and John Gray for clarinetist Chen Halevi.