Leaving Lute (2011) for flute, viola, and harp [7:00] “Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris.” — John Ashbery, quoted by David Lehman in The Last Avant Garde Leaving Lute is a seven-minute encapsulation of seven years spent in Paris (with a brief intermezzo in Istanbul): seven segments, each announced by a new orchestration of the same treble chord, tracing a steady slide from enchantment into disillusionment. Sparks of disparate material fly by at the outset: a constant flow of new distractions, too fast to even really be registered. Ideas are given more room to develop as the pace gradually slows, until the piece eventually gets stuck in its final few minutes, where its focus narrows to an obsessive repetition of increasingly limited material and noise elements progressively take over.