Lemurian Race

Lemurian Race is a three-minute piano quintet — two violins, viola, cello and piano — premiered by the Hezarfen Ensemble in Istanbul in April 2017. It is the first of my pieces named for a lost people, and the companion to Hyperborean Race, written the same spring.

Lemuria is a continent that never existed: a nineteenth-century hypothesis invented to explain how lemurs got from Madagascar to India, which then escaped from science into occult literature, where it became the home of a vanished, gentle, telepathic race. I liked the idea of a homeland that was proposed, believed in, and quietly withdrawn. The quintet is built on that shape. A calm, almost hymn-like chorale in the strings is stated, believed in, and then — over three minutes — eroded by the piano, whose clusters and pedal washes wash over the land until nothing of the chorale is left but its outline in harmonics.

It is a small piece about how a story can be more durable than the place it describes.