Program Note

“IN MY 1998 WORK FOR PIANO, BELL SOLARIS—THE SUN RINGS LIKE A BELL, initiating waves of influence that traverse, shape, and create space, time, and life—twelve movements emerged from subtle and grand transformations of the Hymn of Change, which I had written earlier in 1992. Some years later, after hearing Bell,AndrewTholl was inspired to arrange the Hymn, a kind of slow, gospel waltz, for string quartet.The Bell Solaris score includes embedded texts as part of the communication with performers. In Hymn of Change they come from Pythagoras’s lectures on change, as reported by Ovid: ‘The phrase ‘being born’ is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while ‘dying’ means ceasing to be the same.Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sum of things remains unchanged.’ (Metamorphoses,
trans. Mary M. Innes)” —David Rosenboom
Hymn of Change, performed by the Formalist Quartet, appears on Cold Blue’s Cold Blue Two anthology.