My inspiration for this piece began with the first lines of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” With this sentence, Márquez encodes in the reader an element of memory, which creates an expectation of things to come. When the event happens — the facing of the firing squad — the character and the reader share an experience of recollection: the character recalls an event from his youth, while the reader remembers the first passage of the novel. My musical work begins with a short pre-movement played by a boombox (another repository of memory) that forecasts a sound world to be presented later in the piece. Towards the end of the piece, the timbral expectations presented in the pre-movement are fulfilled.

(Márquez is also the name of the elementary school that I attended.)

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