in another place, in another time (2022)

General Information

Commissioner: The Yale Symphony Orchestra/Yale College New Music
Written: March 2020 – February 2022
Duration: ca. 14.5’
Instrumentation: 3[1.2.3/pic] 3[1.2.3/ca] 3[1.2.3/bcl] 3[1.2.3/cbn] - 4 3 3 1 - tmp+3 - hp, pf - str

Performance History

April 1, 2023: the Yale Symphony Orchestra, led by William Boughton, Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven, CT (World Premiere)
March 28, 2022 (open reading): the Yale Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Boughton

Perusal Score

~ This score below is intended for perusal purposes only, and may not be used for performance. To obtain performance materials, please click here. Thank you! ~

Program Note

“anemoia: n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”
–  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

In the early months of 2020, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, I read Swann’s Way as a student in Yale College’s Directed Studies curriculum – the first part of Marcel Proust’s voluminous novel In Search of Lost Time. The work deals extensively with ideas of memory as the narrator recounts and processes recollections of his childhood, and especially of his mother. The work is pervaded by a deep sense of nostalgia for not simply just a time the narrator cannot return to, but for the simplicity and ignorance of childhood that the narrator has lost in his adulthood.  

In the months following the world’s lockdown in March 2020, I could not stop thinking about Proust’s work and pondering these ideas of nostalgia. But I was also personally miring in my own form of nostalgia – one that was not a longing for the pre-pandemic past, but a feeling of loss and absence of the hypothetical future that was destroyed by the pandemic: my sophomore year of college, canceled tours, summer festivals and performances, friendships, and romantic relationships – that I and world would never come to experience. This was an alternate sort of anemoia (as defined above), but rather than the longing for a period of past that occurred before I was born (as the creators of the word intended), it manifested as a nostalgia for a time I would never know. I was wrapped in the melancholies of an internal, vivid vision of this non-future – a form of fantasizing – that, for whatever reason, felt far more real than fantasy because what I was dreaming of was formerly meant to happen. Then, due to the present state of reality, it was utterly impossible.  

This emerged out of these feelings of ultra-vivid longing and imagination. The piece is pervaded by a haunting sequence of chords that expand and contract by minor-thirds (which open, close, and are present almost throughout the work in some form), which represents this notion of hypothetical-future anemoia. The material is transformed in a myriad of ways to evoke, over the course of the piece, emotions surrounding loss, sadness, indulgence in memory, anxiety, and – at last – coming to terms with one’s past and present reality. We all experience these feelings in our lives, be it at the passing of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or a sudden change in circumstance: in another place, in another time is an elegy to what could have been, to what we desperately wish would be – to the cutting-off of branches on the infinite tree of possibility on which our lives take shape.