I started writing Spacetime Synthesis in the spring of 2018, during my final semester of college. It began simply as a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, as I wrote, I was inspired to expand the work to cover two more movements - Sara Teasdale’s February Twilight, and Henri Poincaré’s essay, The Measure of Time.

While each of the three texts that comprise Spacetime Synthesis are vastly different, I was drawn to them because they each attempt to situate the speaker in relation to their position in the universe. Whether they describe a mathematician attempting to understand a nigh-indescribable universal phenomenon, or a lonely soul observing the sky, or a disgruntled lecture-goer, all three texts position the speaker as an observer of the architecture of the universe.

As a whole, the piece is structured as a dialectical synthesis. It begins with Henri Poincaré’s logical analysis of space and time, continues with Sara Teasdale’s emotional and personal experience of the night sky, and concludes with Walt Whitman’s attempt to reconcile these two approaches. In the first movement, Poincaré’s text is distorted, spoken over itself, and convoluted — sometimes to the point of intentional incomprehensibility. Musical material comes in and out of focus, and is repeated and lost throughout the movement. This fluid structure was inspired by the changes in our understanding of linear space and time at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s also inspired by the ways in which The Measure of Time makes its subject matter both more clear and, at times, more confusing.

The second movement, meanwhile, sets Teasdale’s text, February Twilight, a short and metrically traditional poem. Consequently, the form of the movement perfectly repeats itself, with each section leading clearly into the next. The third movement, a setting of Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, seems to be a clear procession of the text from start to finish — but the last two lines of the poem are quietly and slowly enunciated over the course of the first half of the movement, representing the ignored beauty of the night sky throughout the poem. At the end, melody dissolves into expansive and rich harmonies as we contemplate the beauty of understanding without rigor.