Written for Jesse Clark and the Toy Piano Composers Ensemble in 2015, CPT is inspired by the story of an intriguing set of concepts in physics. The initials refer to three fundamental symmetries: “C” or “charge conjugation” describes an equivalence between matter and antimatter, “P” refers to parity or left-right reflection, while “T” stands for time reversal, the idea that the basic laws of nature are independent of the direction of time. These symmetries are scarcely apparent in everyday experience, but the clues that allow us easily to notice when a film (or piece of music) is played backwards or a picture is viewed in a mirror have more to do with macroscopic features of the world than with the properties of matter’s smallest constituents. At the level of elementary particles, each of these three symmetries was once thought to be absolute, but an exciting series of discoveries over the course of the mid-twentieth century revealed a more subtle reality: each on its own is imperfect while a strangely interwoven combination is preserved. The text includes excerpts from several research papers that marked turning points in the story. As dry and forbidding as the writing may seem at first glance, there is genuine drama behind it, and distinctive authorial voices. I have tried to capture some of that drama and playfully illustrate some of the ideas metaphorically. Musical symmetries of time, pitch and instrumentation show themselves plainly at first in palindromic phrases mirrored between matched pairs of instruments, but as the narrative progresses they are expressed in more thoroughly entangled ways.
