Gwyn Pritchard: From Time to Time
solo piano (1999)

From one sense of time to another; their superimposition, juxtaposition, interaction. But whatever is a “sense” of time? Can time-in-itself be characterised in different ways? Not merely as time that seems to pass swiftly as opposed to slowly; but what about (for example) the density of time, the potency of time.........?

It might equally be argued that the only attribute defining the nature of time is its consistency  (at least from the perspective of everyday life; the cosmic traveller, invoking Einstein, might disagree of course), the only variable is how we fill it, how we use it; and that alone effects our sense, our interpretation of time, which in itself remains invariably neutral. But this leaves us with the problem of what “unused time” might be like, time that is not even used for breathing nor for thought, not even to perceive the passage of time itself.  

If we can’t quite get our heads around that one: such a brutal distinction between time and our experience of it (ourselves within it), then perhaps the idea of sensing different realities within the concept of time is not so absurd; and those celebrated Blake lines about “holding infinity in a the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour” hint at something more profound than their frequent and often indiscriminate quotation suggests.  

For one person at least time ceased to exist on the very day that I completed this little piece: my mother died within the same hour, and it is to her memory that I dedicate it.