Our homes are filled with accumulated ephemeral objects which mark the fleeting moments of our lives. While often overlooked because they are so commonplace, each of these objects tells a story, and has its own hidden life and character — from the quotidian to the unusual, from the sacred to the profane. While deeply evocative, these objects can’t speak for themselves.
Like these objects and the stories they tell, music is itself ephemeral. As objects require a viewer to hold their story, music can only exist when it is being heard. Our lives are a collection of such ephemeral moments. Where some works take as their subject matter big, important, historic themes, Objects and Ephemera searches for meaning in life’s simplest, most personal, and sometimes most mundane moments. It seeks to recover these fleeting moments from their inherent transience and make sense of them.
In the tradition of Robert Schumann’s masterful collections like Kinderszenen, Objects and Ephemera comprises a collection of eighteen short character pieces — each piece under 2 minutes long and taking a single object as its focus. Capping off the collection is a movement, Apartment 14D, which encapsulates the cumulative symbolic meaning of these objects: a sense of groundedness and continuity in spite of life’s ephemerality.
