Composed in 2004 for clarinet, violin, cello and piano
Premiered by Lenora Schneller, clarinet, Kia-Hui Tan, violin, Stephen Palmer, cello, and Emily Goldman, piano; Barnes Hall, Cornell University
Duration: 12 min.
"The nations of that planet are, congenitally, idealistic. Their language and those things derived from their language—religion, literature, metaphysics—presuppose idealism. For the people of Tlön, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts—the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the conjectural Ursprache of Tlön, from which its “present-day” languages and dialects derive; there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs. For example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word “moon,” but there is a verb which in English would be “to moonate” or “to enmoon”. “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö or, as Xul Solar* succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned."
Taken from Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"