Day 28-Unquiet Hours (2017)—David Biedenbender

June 28, 2025

Recording:

We have looked at many pieces that tell stories, reflect nature, or imbibe a person or people this month. But David Biedenbender’s Unquiet Hours doesn’t reflect, it inhabits anxiety and depression. These are a growing concern in our current culture and with this work Biedenbender opens a space many of us know too well. A space of overwhelm, of swirling thoughts, of searching for stillness when the noise inside and outside feels relentless.

The piece begins with fragile colors of vibes and the rimming of glasses. Flutes and bells join in soft gestures that feel like flickers of thought just forming and musically state the motive that will stay with us throughout the work. That motive becomes the gravitational center, pulling everything toward it, slowly transforming as instruments layer in. We hear canons at the quarter and eighth note, increasing the rhythmic pressure. As low brass enter, the sound thickens accumulating weight, like the ensemble itself is on the verge of bursting.

Eventually, the intensity peaks in dissonant waves and screaming brass as the motive hits a fever pitch, just as our monkey mind can do inside our heads. The motive never vanishes. Even at its most chaotic, Biedenbender’s central idea remains, an anxious thought that just won’t be silenced.

And then the storm passes. However this person finds calm, through meditation, exercise, or something else, the mind begins to slow as textures thin. The flute returns. Familiar timbres lead us back to stillness, until we settle into the final shimmering tones of the spinning glasses. Then, at last, we achieve silence and release from our own selves.

This is a work of persistence. Of staying with difficult emotions. Of staying present while the past (depression) and future (anxiety) pull at you from both sides. It’s a remarkable soundscape, of empathy that reminds us we are not alone in wrestling with our inner noise.