for flute, guitar, cello, percussion and piano First Prize, Young Composers' Competition, Asian Composers' League, Seoul, Korea, 2002

The derailleur is that piece of bicycle componentry which crudely knocks the chain from one sprocket or chain-ring to another, resulting in a higher or lower gear. The sensation experienced on a rider's first encounter with the derailleur is strange: one finds oneself pedalling more or less to cover the same distance, but, once one is aware of the derailleur's benefits, the feeling is one of control over gradient, surface and the elements.

The derailleur is directly analogous in music to the phenomenon of metric modulation, a device pioneered in complex forms by Elliott Carter. In derailleurs, metric modulation is used in tutti passages to express ritardando and accelerando with a jumpy, cog-changing precision. Solo sections stand in contrast by allowing individual players the freedom to impose their own subjectivity on the concepts of slowing down and speeding up. The tensions created by the nature of time's passing in the ensemble music compared with that in the solos may be seen as a comment on the nature of our life journeys: though we want our arrivals at destinations to be the result of smooth progressions, we are frequently diverted - derailed even - by the impositions of larger factors.