Compositions

Sepia

Purchase sheet music here

2015
For Violin and Piano
Duration: 9:00

Alice Hong, violin
Benjamin Smith, piano

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the composition of my memories. - C. S. Lewis

Sepia traces the slow unraveling of a memory - how something once innocent and clear can become altered beyond recognition, yet still linger in fragments. Borrowing from the opening phrase of Cinderella’s “Someday My Prince Will Come,” the piece begins with a melody that is simple, familiar, and untouched.

But as the work unfolds, that theme is gradually pulled apart, warped, and transformed through increasingly sorrowful iterations, as though time and grief have stained it beyond repair. In photographic terms, sepia refers to the brownish tint of aging monochrome photographs—images that remain visible, but forever changed by time. In the same way, the borrowed tune in Sepia becomes discolored by memory: still present, but harder and harder to recognize as it slips further from its original form.

Near the end, the theme returns one final time in its pure state - a fleeting glimpse of what once was—before quietly dissolving for good with the cuckoo of the cuckoo clock indicating the passing of time.