The Ends of Histories
for piano and computer
ABOUT
The Ends of Histories for piano and computer (digital video and audio) was commissioned by and is dedicated to pianist Kari Johnson. The work presents sonic and visual materials meant to represent various historical and contemporary ideas regarding how history ends.
There are four types of materials that develop non-linearly in the work and are treated as incommensurable. The materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: a polarized religious ending to history whereby everyone either ascends into a pleasant world or descends into fire; a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent end that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of transition or cataclysm at the “end” of the Mayan calendar in 2012; a socio-political end in which capitalist-democracy supplants all other ideologies and all nation-states transition to this system; and two scientific ends, either mass extinctions as the earth approaches a giant ball of radiation or when an asteroid hits the earth.