“Spooky actions at a distance” was Albert Einstein’s skeptical characterization of the effect now known as “quantum entanglement,” a peculiar illusion of instantaneous communication among particles that have previously interacted and thus become correlated. This phenomenon, later confirmed despite Einstein’s doubt, inspired the piece “(spooky actions) at a distance” at several levels, from the spatial dispersal of the ensemble to the details of pitch and harmony in certain sections. The performers, separated across space and time, communicate mysteriously with each other and their digital doppelgangers. The electronic sound derives from a recording of an earlier piece for the same three instruments— like entangled electrons, their present connections are enmeshed in the memory of an earlier encounter. In one section, the three instruments enact a musical pantomime of the experiments that confirmed the details of entanglement in the early 1980s: the piano sends pairs of “signals” that are “detected” by the cello and saxophone, and some of the pitch material was chosen by an algorithm mimicking the statistical properties of an entangled quantum state. Whatever its Apollonian underpinnings, the piece ends in distinctly Dionysian territory after the performers reunite at the front of the performance space. “(spooky actions)” was completed in 2018 and premiered by the Thin Edge New Music Collective in Toronto.
