the half-life of facts (2014)
the half-life of facts for flute, clarinet in Bb, violin, violoncello, piano.
Circa 15″ minutes in duration.
This is a timecode-supported polytemporal piece.
Refreshed in July 2026
the half-life of facts, commissioned by the Australian new music group, ‘Syzygy Ensemble‘ was premiered on May 6th at the Melbourne Recital Centre as part of the 2015 Metropolis New Music Festival.
A note about the title:
Concerns about the usefulness of knowledge and the challenges of information overload predate contemporary anxieties by decades, centuries, if not millennia. In The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date — which gave us this fantastic illustration of how the Gutenberg press embodied combinatorial creativity — Samuel Arbesman explores why, in a world in constant flux with information proliferating at overwhelming rates, understanding the underlying patterns of how facts change equips us for better handling the uncertainty around us. (He defines fact as “a bit of knowledge that we know, either as individuals or as a society, as something about the state of the world.”)
The Half-Life of Facts: Dissecting the Predictable Patterns of How Knowledge Grows by Maria Popova
“These concerns and analogies resonated with me as a composer who purposefully edges towards ‘overload’ of information [or ‘facts’] to create a state of flux and uncertainty in music where the detail and aural relationships are indeed complex but a changed perspective; an overview, can reveal larger structures and processes at work. People often talk about knowing or understanding music. I don’t want people to know my music: As a composer, I want to be surprised by it; I don’t want to make it into a known or knowable fact because, as we know, facts have half-lives. I prefer to experience the flux and form in the moment and take pleasure from the visceral engagement this produces. I hope listeners to my work are able to do the same so that the music reveals itself anew with each subsequent listening and their ‘understanding’ of it evolves over time.”
Marc Yeats