Cy Twombly's Hero and Leander, a triptych of abstract paintings, encapsulates an experience of time in a fixed work. The surging gestures of the first panel suggest the drowning of the eponymous couple, while the increasingly muted palette and textural effects of the second and third panels evoke the calming waters of the Hellespont as the tragedy concludes.

Twombly's work expresses a dynamic event through a static medium. This piece responds by inverting the painter's logic, seeking to create an experience of immobilized time in the dynamic medium of music. A small set of materials, including howling feedback and noisy, purposefully degraded recordings, are sculpted by complex dynamic changes, then cut into fragments and separated by neutralizing silences. Different patterns of sounding and silence are imposed on each type of gesture, resulting in both densely overlapping and extremely spare textures. These procedures create tensions between stasis and motion, and encourage the listener to hear the different materials from multiple perspectives, as though looking at a painting from several angles.

Hero and Leander is dedicated to Charles Boone and Josefa Vaughan.

Performances:
2005.09.21: Harvest Moon Festival, Montréal, Canada
2003.09.07: Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA
2003.06.06: University of Washington, Seattle, WA
2003.05.13: Risonanze 2003, Teatro Fondamente Nuove, Venice, Italy
2003.04.10: The LAB, San Francisco, CA
2003.04.03: Stanford University, Stanford, CA
2003.03.28: Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

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