Small Infinities

I was listening to a lot of Schubert, particularly his late string quartets, as I wrote “Small Infinities.” There is an obsessiveness in these pieces that Schubert transforms into music that feels both intimate and transcendent. He wrote these pieces during a sickness that would ultimately take his life, and it is tempting to think of them arising from a deep contemplation of our place in the infinite. I am older than Schubert was when he wrote these pieces but I don’t feel like I have much to say about death or our place in the cosmos. But as I worked on this piece, I thought about small moments of obsession, however mundane—ordinary little moments in which I lost a sense of time through some repetitive stimulus or activity, and perhaps for a fleeting, magical instant had a sense of something infinite.

The five movements of the piece are each inspired by a different memory: listening to music as a child (playing tapes on repeat until they wore out and being captivated by the bumpy repetitions of a broken record); my brother practicing violin in the room next to mine, hypnotically (and frustratingly) repeating passages; the lyrical funeral parlor director at my grandmother’s funeral who kept blandly but musically intoning “I am sorry for your loss”; the experience of sitting next to the Pacific Ocean at night on a trip home from college, the entrancing rhythm of the waves opening my mind to a swirling series of thoughts; and the adrenaline joy of childhood video games: playing, dying, restarting and playing again. Each movement is a sort of obsessive poem based on these initial memories, a search for meaning in a series of repetitions before the music inevitably decays and breaks apart, or perhaps just drifts away.