In the Garden of Endless Sleep
| Year Composed: | 2020 |
| Instrumentation: | ob, pno |
| Duration | 12 minutes |
Program Notes
The title refers to a fictitious place within Gene Wolfe's enigmatic science fiction novel, The Book of the New Sun. In an early chapter, Wolfe describes a glass dome that houses a number of gardens, each of which seems to exist in a different spatial and temporal reality. In the Garden of Endless Sleep, there lies a lake, from which one of the novel's central characters is mysteriously and inexplicably born.
While the music bears no narrative connection to any of the characters, events, or themes of the novel, Wolfe's imagination supplied me with the spark of an image that I found irresistible: a garden that moves through time, flickering between present, past, and future. The idea of viewing the garden - a cultivated slice of natural beauty - through various stages of growth and decay was fascinating to me, and I wanted the music, with its tangle of stylistic allusions, to reflect this juxtaposition.
I was also interested in another kind of juxtaposition: that of simplicity versus impermeability. In this regard, I was influenced heavily by Wolfe's prose, which is difficult, elusive, at times frustrating; the rare moment of lucidity and insight never lingers. I tried to capture this in part by evoking musical memories from older time periods in a somewhat hazy fashion, and in part through texture - in particular the use of the piano's sustain pedal to blur certain harmonies together. The structure of the piece is 'fuzzy' as well, invoking not so much rondo form as its afterimage. Although there is an earthy, organic aspect to the piece - the melodious but often asymmetric oboe lines, for example, suggesting the contours of vines and roots and the sprawl of overgrown vegetation - the music is otherwise steeped in a dream-like and uneasy vagueness.
This was the first work I composed since the Covid-19 lockdown. During some of the darker moments I experienced while writing this work, I have often imagined the 'Garden of Endless Sleep' as the Earth itself, basking in the glow of its lush, fertile history while hurtling toward an uncertain future.
Sheet Music
- Score & parts available for rental here.
Performances
- November 16, 2021 - Charles Hamann, oboe; Frederic Lacroix, piano. NAC Fourth Stage (livestream), National Arts Centre, Ottawa.
Commisions and Awards
- Commissioned by Charles Hamann.
Reviews
- "In the Garden of Endless Sleep, a 2020 tapestry by Kevin Lau, employs improvisational polyrhythms, expansive intervals, and recitative rather than cool 9/8 pastoral meters to capture Lau’s own longing and fear of the unknown. Repeated notes here are used as stationary vibrato, the negation of tonality mollified only by the mournful sighs of the oboe. The work's closing punchline materializes as an A-minor song over the drone of the lowest note on the piano keyboard, with the dreariness of Shostakovich and the soothing regularity of a Bach prelude." Emily White, New York Concert Review