Time Isn't Real (2025)
for string quartet | 00:08:00
by Melissa Dunphy
About
Commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and Diane and Lawrence Blum for their Chamber Music For All Project.
Premiered by the Dover String Quartet, January 4, 2026.
Composer's Notes
During the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, I became disquieted by a growing feeling that our common-sense intuition of time is incorrect. As a musician, I am familiar with manipulating tempo and gesture to create a sense of time dilation or contraction, but this new suspicion went further: what if we only perceive time as a unidirectional dimension because of our limited biology? Fatalism, or the "block universe" theory, is a well-established argument in philosophy and physics, but for the first time, the unreality of time felt like an intuition rather than an intellectual concept. Strangely, whenever I have spoken the words "time isn't real" out loud in conversation, I have been met with universal agreement and even the occasional shock of recognition, as though many of us have simultaneously experienced the same sensation.
"Time isn't real" is an especially unnerving idea when your life and work revolves around a temporal art form. This quartet plays with polymeter, close canons (a nod to the frenzy of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, which I loved performing as a teen violist), driving rock riffs, and abrupt moments of calm to convey my reactions: apprehension, panic, and the clarity and elation of glimpsing freedom from the tyranny of urgency and the inexorable schedule of modern life.
Press Quotes
"The single-movement work opens relentlessly, its quick rhythms over and under longer lines portraying how time can appear both fast and slow at the same time. Filled with passages that build in intensity and then fall back, the work ends by rising up the harmonic scale to slow legato lines filled with air and grace before returning to a busy musical conclusion. The composer and the quartet received several sustained enthusiastic ovations, and during the ensuing intermission, the audience was buzzing with excitement about this well-conceived program." [Broad Street Review]
Performances
- 4 Jan, 2026: Dover Quartet at Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA