Abstract Perceiver (2019) for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello

“I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.” This quote from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” inspired me to write this work. To emulate the dream-like state that I picture the narrator to be experiencing, I built an open harmony. The element of destabilization that comes along with that state of being is realized through shifts in harmony, creating dissonant intervals. The piece travels through these harmonies while playing with two main melodic ideas, representing illusory images that are described in Borges’s story.