fl/bn/pno. Duration: 7:00. Score & Parts. See also Full Score.

   by Paul A. Epstein

Several years ago I began thinking of my compositions as imaginary landscapes, not in the picturesque sense but rather as expressions of structural rules, much as a real landscape expresses its geological, botanical, and climatological structures. I have been fascinated by the intricacy of pattern in nature that often results in apparently unpredictable modifications.

It is this unpredictability that I have tried to build into my music through the complexity — and at times arbitrariness — of the rules by which variables interact and change. Prime Times 2 is built entirely on a grid of 12 rhythmic cycles - all prime to one another - with durations of 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, and 37 16th notes.

Prime Times 2 was a winner of the 2008 Pascal Gallois bassoon composition call.