Garden of Forking Paths #2

Garden of Forking Paths #2 for Flute and Bb Piccolo Trumpet by Jan Swafford

The Garden of Forking Paths #2 for flute and piccolo trumpet was composed in 1970.  The idea for the piece came from a fantasy story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it a writer creates an apparently incomprehensible novel of that name (The Garden of Forking Paths) in which, as it turns out, every moment of the story, as of life, lies at a forking path that can go in many directions.

In this piece, the piccolo trumpet plays an insistent fanfare; the flute replies with sultry glissandos, and in the first movement the two paths never meet. In the second movement, both play the same melody, but not in the same rhythm. In the last movement the two subsume the characters of all the music that came before, but each sill on his his or her own path.