Brian Simalchik - Finite Things (world premiere) by Aqueeressence

Brian Simalchik’s music is nuanced and captivating, always demonstrating a highly sensitive treatment of the continuum between sound and silence. We have felt a close connection to Brian’s artistry ever since working together on his Seven Songs at nief-norf Summer Music Festival in 2016. As such, we are beyond thrilled to present the world premiere of Brian Simalchik’s Finite Things, written in 2021 for our duo. Elusive, ruminative, and dream-like, this four-movement work resists easy categorization and unilateral meaning. Simalchik speaks eloquently about the piece’s conception and possible interpretations thusly:

"The title for the piece comes from a line in the last stanza of Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘The Far Field,’ a meditation on death and the ends of things. This poem was on my mind a lot during the Fall of 2020, when the many losses and absences of the pandemic hung all around us. The line reads: ‘All finite things reveal infinitude.’ Much of this piece is made up of dream-like progressions of sparse, irregular melodic fragments, suspended in both time and the decaying resonance of the piano. These little fragments reminded me of the dead and decaying things that fill the fields of Roethke’s poem, as well as the abandoned fields on an old farm near my childhood home that I used to explore. You could think of them as being like pieces of rusted machinery, or a decaying fence - overgrown with weeds, fallen down or rusted out, but with the original form still visible beneath the overgrowth, the rust, or despite the pieces being broken apart.

One other possible argument the piece makes, to me, is how beautiful it is to put so much care into a temporary thing, or into a series of moments which are gone as soon as they arrive. That's really all we can do with our lives—chase beauty, truth, goodness, etc.—without understanding what that might mean in any larger sense. We do it in spite of knowing that we will pass; you might say we do it because we know, deep down, that we will pass, and we want to do everything we can to make meaning during this one, all-too-brief time that we know is ours.”