Music takes place in time, but repetition beguilingly makes it knowable in the way of something outside of time … it feels like a different way of inhabiting a passage — a different kind of orientation.
Elizabeth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind
During significant events in our lives, time seems to stand still or at least pass a little slower. We replay moments over and over in our heads, re-examining every word, every look, every surrounding detail. In Moeror (latin for sorrow or grief), I examine how our memory of events is never perfect, sometimes we embellish, sometimes we mis-remember aspects, causing us eventually to question what is real and fabricated. In the piece, materials repeat, sometimes exactly, at other times with additional processing or temporally shortened, eventually leading to change. In Moeror, I want to explore Margulis’s concepts about why repetition is so psychoemotionally enticing even in melancholic works, and Joanna Demers's notion that, “tragic art furnishes catharsis or purification … there is a thrill in anticipating the dissolution we know is in store… it is an exquisite tragedy always ending the same way.”
The work is dedicated to Jóhann Jóhannsson and those we hold close in our memory.