Sarah Belle Reid

This concert-length multimedia work for electronically augmented trumpet (MIGSI), quarter-tone flugelhorn, Serge modular synthesizers, video projections, and light bulbs, is inspired by a fantastical story of a lone interstellar traveler who has been swallowed by a massive whale that is perpetually floating through space.

The piece takes places from within the belly of the whale as it slips through cracks and folds in the fabric of space-time, existing in a state where all perceived distinction between past, present, and future is lost. In this universe, time does not flow or march forward in an ordered fashion. In fact, at times it does not move at all, slipping from one timeframe to another, getting tangled in fleeting crevices between temporal folds, all without warning or reason.

The Sameness of Earlier and Later Times and Nows is composed around three main characters, each with their own distinct sonic motif: the traveler, characterized by a solemn, slightly lopsided dirge on flugelhorn; the whale, depicted by the sounds of sloshing and dripping; and a gang of mischievous caretakers who have taken up residence in the whale’s belly, who are represented by light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. These characters occupy the same physical space, but they are temporally displaced from one another, and even from aspects of themselves: sounds captured from the objects themselves are removed from their source and juxtaposed with other characters, and the compositional materials of one character is transferred onto the temporal structure of another.