One Day as a Thousand Years

2018, piano and electronics

One Day As a Thousand Years unfolds in two large sections following the Christian liturgical calendar. The church year is cast in two broad arches, centered on the two pivotal mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The first flows from Advent through the Nativity to Epiphany, the second from Lent through Holy Week and Easter to Pentecost. Beyond their particular Christological import, what unites them is a shared structure: a period of waiting, followed by a crisis point of Divine action, and finally an expansion into the world. In the Incarnation, the “local” Divine event of Christ’s Nativity takes on universal significance in the celebration of Epiphany, which proclaims his birth as not only for the salvation of Israel, but for all the world. Likewise the Resurrection, which finds its universalized expansion in Pentecost, the descent of the Spirit on a small band of followers who then carry it out into the world. The symmetry and union of these two spans is deepened by their focus on birth: the birth of God as a human being in the Nativity, and the resurrected Christ as “first born of the dead” –– the former as the Divine becomes man, the latter as the way is opened for man to become Divine.