The Last Question Will Last Forever (2018)
Instrumentation -
alto saxophone, 4: 3-octave marimba
Duration - ca. 7'50''
Performance history -
March 31, 2018, Montreal, Canada, Stef Jackson and David Therrien-Brongo
March 26, 2019, Montreal, Canada, Gavin Goodwin and David Therrien-Brongo
Program Notes -
The piece is driven by energy created from repetitions. Repetitions over many times do not remain unchanged, and therefore create a kind of development in their progression.
In this piece, one repetition often comes to interrupt another. The structure of the piece itself eventually becomes a process of repeated interruptions. This process will not suggest to be approaching an end, or a direction or answer, simply because it can just go forever, and finally becomes a kind of Sisyphean practice.
Used as a metaphor, this kind of practice reminds me of one’s life. As one is nevertheless ignorant to details of the future; life is never built to a specific answer, but merely to a kind of development in which one period of life will finally be interrupted by another, or by death. We are questioning, and we will be questioning forever. Through the questions we present, we somehow get to know a bit of meaning of our lives.
A design based on Fibonacci Series is used in this piece to control both the form and the pitches. In specific, the number of each repeated pattern is based on a chosen Fibonacci number, and there are five different note series to be used as the pitch material, crated from two fundamentals drawn from consecutive Fibonacci numbers or intervals.
Recording by Jackson and Therrien-Brongo.
Picture © Albert Camus
Instrumentation -
alto saxophone, 4: 3-octave marimba
Duration - ca. 7'50''
Performance history -
March 31, 2018, Montreal, Canada, Stef Jackson and David Therrien-Brongo
March 26, 2019, Montreal, Canada, Gavin Goodwin and David Therrien-Brongo
Program Notes -
The piece is driven by energy created from repetitions. Repetitions over many times do not remain unchanged, and therefore create a kind of development in their progression.
In this piece, one repetition often comes to interrupt another. The structure of the piece itself eventually becomes a process of repeated interruptions. This process will not suggest to be approaching an end, or a direction or answer, simply because it can just go forever, and finally becomes a kind of Sisyphean practice.
Used as a metaphor, this kind of practice reminds me of one’s life. As one is nevertheless ignorant to details of the future; life is never built to a specific answer, but merely to a kind of development in which one period of life will finally be interrupted by another, or by death. We are questioning, and we will be questioning forever. Through the questions we present, we somehow get to know a bit of meaning of our lives.
A design based on Fibonacci Series is used in this piece to control both the form and the pitches. In specific, the number of each repeated pattern is based on a chosen Fibonacci number, and there are five different note series to be used as the pitch material, crated from two fundamentals drawn from consecutive Fibonacci numbers or intervals.
Recording by Jackson and Therrien-Brongo.
Picture © Albert Camus
© 2019 by Zhuosheng Jin.