The Sunset / Eternal Horizon

In collaboration with the composer, Yoonjung Lee

Cherry, paper, brass, candle

84” x 24” x 54”
2025


Composed by Yoonjung Lee for flute and bassoon.
Performed by Ivan Smaltsuga (Flute) and Jonathan Mokry (Bassoon).


Commissioned for Synesthesia Spectrum, Making Space (Baltimore, MD, 2025). 

“The Sunset / Eternal Horizon” meditates on the liminal phenomenology of walking and migration. Two performers playing the flute and bassoon, woodwind instruments of controlled breath, walked around the long music stand. Slowly, they followed the score and each other in circles.

In Brian Massumi’s idea of “walking as controlled falling,” each step leans into external forces like gravity with freedom and constraint, mundanity and necessity. Speculating a path of blurred starts and ends, the piece instead directs attention to the pressures of breath and movement itself.

The score contemplates a musical motif derived from the intonation of the phrase “a moment of stillness” in Lee’s native language. Exploring Milan Kundera’s theory that “the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting,” it holds the tension and release, purification and velocity, that emerges in the act of walking. Through repetitive breaths, it seeks a subtle equilibrium within the passage of time, sonically tracing the boundary between pause and progression.