composer’s notes from Arabesque Recording:

The Advancing Moment was commissioned by the San Francisco Contemporary Music
Players under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and premiered by
them in 1992 under another title. I first conducted it in its final version in 1993 with
the SONOR ensemble (which performs it on this disc) at UC San Diego. The Cold War
was newly-over and the First Gulf War was occurring as I sketched the music early in
1991. That war made quite an impression on me. Out of the troubled air a working title
The War of the Birds and the Reptiles appeared, and I ran with it. I ran with the
idea of two opposed forces, one of birdlike, skittering arabesques and the other of
scaly, implacable armor, and divided my six players into two ensembles: the chittering
flute, clarinet, violin, and cello (Birds), and the more earth-bound, mechanical piano
and percussion (Reptiles). These two ensembles are never heard in their pure form as
a quartet (Birds) and a duo (Reptiles), their pure form being only something to work
from as a foil to their the two ensembles essential woundedness and instability;
and its only during the pieces final 4 minutes, after what I mean to be heard as the
works pivotal Turning Point, that they finally merge with a single, totalizing intent.

[For the record, the impurities of the two ensembles before the Turning Point
consist in the Reptiles piano/percussion duo being added-to one by one and left
in turn by each of the Birds instruments; and the Birds quartet being always one
instrument short, since each of its instruments will always at some point be taking
its turn with the Reptiles before returning to its nest.]

Am I reaching for a metaphor here? Well, yes: the shifting allegiances, textures, and
(even) identities of the pieces two impure trios before the Turning Point mirror the
eerily mutable worlds of politics and diplomacy where transparency is clear as mud
and black is white and where the truths that whole populations have lived-by for
decades are overturned in a second (Such, at least, was the post-Cold War world at
the time TAM was being written and so it is today.) The works title and conclusion
point to and suggest that pivotal moment of convergence when human beings go
beyond the niceties of polite political discourse and diplomacy, that moment of
blindness when people no longer truly see each other and culture and civilization
are negated and the missile strikes, the terrorists bomb explodes, the bullet impacts.
What lies on the other side of such moments? We have our own today.

Stravinsky has written of cinematic aspects of his Symphony in Three Movements
(1945), qualities suggested by newsreel images of the Allied victory in World War II.
In 1991 it was not newsreels but CNN and, above all, the insistent sirens of Riyadh,
Baghdad, and Tel Aviv that triggered this musics genesis. At a distance of more than
thirty years from its date of composition, subsequent events only underscore the
timeliness and ongoing relevance of those concerns which The Advancing Moment
bears witness to and reflects.

The Advancing Moment was recorded April 27, 1994 at UC San Diego.