Helen Sung

"Temporality"

Temporality, Helen Sung’s Jazz Coalition Covid Commission Fund composition, is a two movement work exploring themes of grief and time during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this video she performs the first movement "Elegy for the City," a musical eulogy and lament for the terrible human loss suffered by New York and other cities. The second movement "Time Loops" evokes her experience of time during the lockdown. "I still think of time as a mainly linear experience, " Helen says, "but this period of continued solitude and isolation transformed that notion: time sometimes felt like a closed loop, where each day was indistinguishable from the next. Other times, a month seemed to fly by in what felt like a single day!” The concept of music unfolding in time — in rhythm — provides a fruitful space for Sung, where she utilizes musical devices including ostinatos, melodic motifs, and cyclical harmonic progressions to help create this new composition. You can hear the entire work on her new album Quartet+ (featuring Helen's Quartet with special guest Harlem Quartet), available September 17, 2021, on Sunnyside Records.

"Temporality"
Video Cred: Samuel Martinelli
Helen Sung — Piano
John Ellis — Tenor & Soprano Saxophones and Flute
David Wong — Bass
Kendrick Scott — Drums

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