Slow Bells takes its title from two inspirations. The fictional “slow glass” featured in several stories by Irish science fiction author Bob Shaw is a material through which light travels so slowly that it takes years to pass through a pane— to look through such a window is to observe scenes from the past. In the meticulous canonic construction of Slow Bells, every idea introduced by the baritone percolates slowly through the ensemble until it is echoed by the soprano nearly a minute and a half later. The music’s unbroken 22-minute arc progresses with ponderous, lumbering intensity to a climax and unwinds just as deliberately to a quiet close, building a fractal-like web of relationships across multiple time scales. Evoking the second half of the title, a church-bell-like chiming quality is heard throughout. Written in 2008, Slow Bells was one of the composer’s earlier extended works.