This piece was written to honour, in some small way, a person of great significance in my life. We met while she was in remission, had a glorious, silly, fun, and open and honest relationship. Then she had a relapse and died. The piece attempts to find some sort of meaning in the random senseless meaninglessness of existence: the joy, the sorrow, and the ever present shadow of death.
Musically, it is about the tension between the constant and the novel. The constant is the obsessive use of a few basic motifs: the minor third; the minor second (often presented as a cross-relation); and repeated notes. The novel is found in the struggle continually to find new ways of presenting these motifs. The broad arc of the piece places this tension in a large A-B-A’, slow-fast-slow structure. The fast B section is relatively more complex, being, essentially, a stream of consciousness representing the highs, lows, and unknowns of a relationship. The slow A sections are more insistent, focusing on fewer gestures. But the second A does incorporate material from B, possibly having learned something from the experience. However, its conclusion is not a happy one, and the piece ends on a mournful C#, a minor third lower than where it began.