A Complete Wealth of Time (ACWOT) (duration 17') (1989–90), for two pianos, was composed while the composer was in France on a Fulbright Scholarship working with Gérard Grisey. The work takes shape as a set of variations on a four-note motive that appears in its clearest form just after an introduction that the composer describes as “noisy.” “The motive is a skeleton,” he writes, “devoid of any particular dress or character of its own. The four notes generate and pass through many different stylistic configurations, progressing from simple to more complex harmonic/rhythmic configurations.”
Campion recounts a remarkable dream in explanation of the piano duo’s unusual title and its preoccupation with the fleshing out of motivic “skeletons”: “It was night at the famous Natural History Museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I found myself in the Great Hall of Time, which displays the march of evolution by way of a fabulous parade of skeletons—with a human one heading the macabre, weirdly homogeneous assembly. I realize that Death is in the room. He wears a French policeman’s uniform and is working as the night-guard for the exhibition. Being young, and realizing that no force could possibly know more about life, I attempt to strike up a conversation. The Grim Reaper cooperated and a lengthy exchange followed. Death informed me that his role as celestial janitor is a restricted one, that organic material is only processed according to guidelines. This seemed comforting and eventually we arrived at a metaphysical question. ‘Is the life that strives in the Romantic sense against hopeless odds and personal limitations a life that has meaning, or is it, in light of Death, an absurd waste of energy—a defunct ego-centric western cultural fallacy?’ Death was coy. He lowered his head and responded in an almost inaudible voice. He might have said ‘it is a complete waste of time,’ but I heard ‘it is a complete wealth of time.’”
Selected performance history of A Complete Wealth of Time: Gloria Chang and Vicki Ray, San Francisco, March 22, 2004–05 season; Chang and Ray, Monday Evening Concerts, Los Angeles County Museum; Chang and Ray, Cornell University, Bucknell University, Weis Center for the Performing Arts, and Syracuse University, 1999–2000 season; New Millennium Ensemble, Columbia University, November 1996.
