Time is how you spend your love ranges widely, from core repertoire for string quartet and solo percussion to moments where the two come together. At its centre are two works by Samuel Adams: Sundial, which unfolds as a dreamlike sonic landscape, and Devotions, an instrumental cantata in seven movements drawing on Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.
When Beethoven repeats a small motif no fewer than 48 times in the Scherzo of his Sixteenth String Quartet, it becomes clear that he too was drawn to the ways music can stretch, suspend, and reshape our sense of time.
Time is one of the most personal materials a musician can work with. We count it, subdivide it, stretch it, and lose ourselves in it. What drew me to this program is how obsession and devotion live inside repetition — how the same gesture, returned to again and again, becomes something entirely different each time.
Playing with the Marmen Quartet and working with Samuel Adams’ music gave me a new understanding of what percussion can be in a chamber setting. Not just rhythm, not just colour, but a voice within a shared sense of time.
The title comes from a poem. It is the simplest definition of love I know, and also the most demanding. How you spend your time is how you spend your love.
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Photos © Rob van Dam — available in press kit