Premiered at the Penn Sound Collective concert of graduate composers by the TAK ensemble
at the ARCH Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania. March 2019
Duration: 5'

Program Notes

Time moves on mercilessly — independent of, and indifferent to any of our human events and interactions. Any meaningful moment that we would like to hold on to… vanishes irrevocably, as if nothing had happened. This line opens and closes the poem. Tik-Tak reminds us of the relentless flow of time with the incessant sounds of a ticking clock. I chose to write in Polish because the clock’s “tik-tak” contains the word “tak”, which has a number of meanings in this language — yes, such as, as if, as much — all of them being used in the poem. Finally, this word is also a bow to the ensemble it was written for: the TAK ensemble.