Echoes of Erasure

Echoes of Erasure captures a melancholic sense of decay that people may feel when reflecting on the current state of the world.

Inspired by Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, Echoes of Erasure serves as an auditory meditation on the fragility of memories and the forces that shape the connections to reality we hold onto—or lose.

The new composition, interwoven with citations from ancient musical cultures, reflects the quiet devastation of a world where objects, concepts, and memories are systematically erased, leaving behind only faint echoes within the musical experience. As the piece progresses, the music undergoes a gradual process of erasure and degradation.

The saxophone quartet embodies the human response to this loss: resistance, adaptation, and ultimately, acceptance of the emptiness left behind. The electronics act as an archive, a fragile repository of memories on the brink of disappearance.

Echoes of Erasure explores themes of transience, absence, and the poignant beauty of trying to hold onto something destined to fade. It references what the music philosopher Adorno called “the fractured world”— a world where hope, if it exists, lies in the scattered fragments of what we remember, as Echoes of Erasure. In the disintegration of a piece of music, there is always “a promise of what is yet to come,” a glimpse of a new musical world.