Program Notes:

While composing Like a Whirling Sand Clock for clarinet, cello and piano, I was occupied with the notion of leaking time process, which is a microcosmos of a larger process, best to be described as going back in time.
In September 2006, I feel that the world is standing on a pivot point: on one hand, the various religious and political forces insist on rooting themselves deeper and deeper into what they see as the only truth, while in reality such ideas and especially the religious ones are extremely fundamentalist, reactionary and ill-minded.
 

For me, such clashes of ideas and ideals are reminiscences of the dark middle-ages days and the crusades, where people killed people because of blind belief. Yet, in our days, with sophisticated mass destruction tools as developed most efficiently by humanity, one asks himself towards where we are heading and what will bring tomorrow.
 

The feeling of evaporating, leaking time gets stronger and stronger while our era’s events remind more and more what history books tells us. While imagining an ever-whirling sand clock that drops its sand grains one by one while the sand pile is collected at the upper tube and not the lower one, (thus indicating a going back in time process), one can imagine visually what I have tried to portrait with sounds.
 

Like a Whirling Sand Clock was generously commissioned in memory of Adele and John Gray for clarinetist Chen Halevi.