Time's Long Ruin (2016)
8 minutes
for solo piano

Commissioned by The Firm New Music, Adelaide.

First performance by Clemens Leske, October 2013 at Elder Hall, Adelaide, South Australia.

Time's Long Ruin is a fantasy for piano, composed in 2012 as a preparatory exercise to flesh out some themes to be used in a larger work, an opera with the working title Innocence.
The piece bears the same title as the book upon which the Opera is based. This novel by Adelaide author Stephen Orr investigates childhood, surburban Adelaide in the '50s and '60s, change, loss, hope and memory.
That all should change to ghost and glance and gleam,
And so transmuted stand beyond all change,
And we be poised between the unmoving dream
And the sole moving moment – this is strange.
Past all contrivance, word, or image, or sound,
Or silence, to express, that we who fall
Through time’s long ruin should weave this phantom ground
And in its ghostly borders gather all.
There incorruptible the child plays still,
The lover waits beside the trysting tree,
The good hour spans its heaven, and the ill,
Rapt in their silent immortality,
As in commemoration of a day
That having been can never pass away.
-Edwin Muir