PmuD II is, in essence, a musical reimagination of a short poem by Lev Stewart-Brodsky. The entire poem except the last two lines after “THE END” is used. The last two lines, while unused in the music, served as a compositional motto. This piece presupposes a few performative factors the COVID-19 pandemics imposed upon musicians:

1. Individual parts are recorded independently of one another, then the recordings are put together by audio/video-editing software.
2. In order to facilitate the process of 1., players would often listen to the click track to achieve the synchronicity of the other parts.

If there is a sound system that allows the three players to listen to their own click tracks simultaneously via a DAW, live performance of this piece is possible. Taking the principle of hemiolas as a point of departure, I divided a temporal cycle of 7.5 seconds into 13 beats, 16 beats, and 19 beats, deriving tempi of 104, 128, and 152, respectively. Each of the three performers listens to a click track unique to the part and independent from other parts, except all three parts share a downbeat at every 7.5 seconds. The piece is a counterpoint of these three tempi with musical materials woven in these three temporal planes, evoking a sense of uncanniness, one of the predominant aspects of Lev’s poem. I am grateful to Sputter Box for extending an opportunity to write this piece, to Lev Stewart-Brodsky for granting a permission to use his imaginative text, and to Seth Brodsky for sharing the poem to me. More information on Sputte Box’s Shelter-In-Sound project