Ayla Cosnett - "Splinters of Messianic Time" (2026)

Premiered June 27, 2026 Dalton Center Recital Hall, Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA Jack Synoski, double bass Recording engineered by Becky Brown et al. / mixed by Ayla Cosnett ***** Program note: “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.” —Walter Benjamin (trans. Dennis Redmond), “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) Splinters of Messianic Time was written in the spring of 2026 for bassist Jack Synoski to premiere at the 2026 SPLICE Institute. It represents an attempt to reconcile (with) and in some sense redeem an overwhelming accretion of strange shadows and knots of myth which had come to dominate my psyche since my participation in the 2025 iteration of SPLICE, an experience which profoundly affected all aspects of my life and art. While this may have been doomed from the beginning as an act of spiritual alchemy, coming after several other attempts at as much which ultimately engendered no real transfiguration of the referent, the ineffable specular presence of this reservoir of ideas and memories had retained such a monopoly on my personal sense of meaning that it seemed the only alternative to consciously rising to fail at this task again would be to have a work conceived as something else gradually and far less artfully slip into that same role. This piece can nonetheless unequivocally lay claim to having granted redemptive rest to a (far inferior) piece for the same instrumentation from my undergraduate years, which was never performed for a variety of tangled reasons and has subsequently been scrubbed from history. Ostensibly, this all has something to do with abusing recordings of the double bass to generate wavetables and as transfer functions for nonlinear waveshaping, and with controlling those mechanisms with parameter values derived from the logistic equation as seeded by analyzing the amplitude of the instrument itself before being left to run autonomously. There may be something in there about the insistence of a symbol in all degrees of perception (both right around any given corner in the broader world and as a master signifier defining the entire space in which anything is staged), and the apparently random dance of the logistic map around itself which is nonetheless strictly determined by a simple self-contingent process of history accumulating in response to itself but never resolving. As Benjamin writes, the redemption of the past and the creation of a future is not an inevitable result of this so-called progress but something radically outside of it that must be envisioned and fought for; here, the bass would perhaps present its means of shaping, serving as a Greek chorus to, and interfering with these software processes according to materials defined by a radically different logic (that of what one might consider musical language) as serving this purpose, but it, too, is weighed down by a stunted march of irregularly-metered time that strings together mangled, decontextualized quotations of a musical memory bound up in loss, and by delay buffers that force it into counterpoint with funhouse-mirror recapitulations of its past. Whether this dialectic amounts to anything greater is probably not my own judgment to make when the world of meaning from which it springs forth is wont to shrivel and shatter where it tries to assert an external existence-in-itself and the concomitant right to shape in turn the external world which has shaped it. This piece owes a considerable debt to Sarah Hennies and Liza Lim, both visitors to the University of Louisville School of Music during my final semester there, in terms of both the musical and philosophical ideas they expounded upon and the generous creative and moral support they provided.