Time's Long Ruin

Time's Long Ruin (2013)

Duration: approx. 11 mins 20 sec

Difficulty: Advanced

Time's Long Ruin is a fantasy for piano, composed in 2012-13 as a preparatory exercise to flesh out some themes to be used in a larger work, an opera titled Innocence.

The piece bears the same title as the book upon which the Opera is based. This novel by Adelaide author Stephen Orrr investigates childhood, surburban Adelaide in the '50s and '60s, change, loss, hope and memory.

That all should change to ghost and glance and gleam,

And so transmuted stand beyond all change,

And we be poised between the unmoving dream

And the sole moving moment – this is strange.

Past all contrivance, word, or image, or sound,

Or silence, to express, that we who fall

Through time’s long ruin should weave this phantom ground

And in its ghostly borders gather all.

There incorruptible the child plays still,

The lover waits beside the trysting tree,

The good hour spans its heaven, and the ill,

Rapt in their silent immortality,

As in commemoration of a day

That having been can never pass away.



-Edwin Muir