«At some point the pieces painstakingly assemble into the form of a full piano, albeit one that looks somewhat worn, with broken strings. Given more time, sudden events create sound waves in the room that focus onto a broken piano string, oscillating it until it whips into place and fuses the broken ends together. Finally, the wear on the piano gradually disappears, as remnant molecules join onto the piano to complete the form it started with, complete with a final polish».

Quote from «Out of equilibrium: understanding cosmological evolution to lower-entropy states», CALT-68-2845

I saw a clip from a documentary on entropy. It discussed a thought experiment involving sealing an apple in a box and leaving it for a duration longer than the entire lifespan of the Universe. The concept was that over time, the particles would disperse evenly throughout the box. But then, something magical might occur. The particles would randomly interact with each other, in every possible combination. This meant that given sufficient time, we could open the box again and retrieve our apple.

This was pure magic and precisely what I wanted to share. We all are faced with the cruel fact of reality that everything fades away, vanishes, or transcends beyond. Yet, through experiencing art and quiet observation of nature, for instance, we get a sentimental feeling that there must be more to it just leaving us slowly. To me, this is tightly connected with my childhood experiences of perceiving the world.

I read the article that the apple-in-a-box story was based on. The CalTech physicists used different analogies - an ice cube in a glass of water and a grand piano in a box. They meticulously and scientifically calculated all the particles and arrived at a very specific amount of time for the grand piano to slowly reassemble. This is how I conceived the idea for a lecture.

The opera ended up being about one simple thing - disappearance, its inevitability, and its beauty, too. The audience is taken through a series of fragments - four cities: Zora, Valdrada, Moriana and Andria (or, to put it differently, four songs about them, sung by the fantastic soprano and baritone) and four fragments of a lecture on entropy (that I am presenting myself). The lecture fragments are on general entropy, the theory of an ice cube unmelting with time, grand piano reassembling again and, finally, theorising about the possibility for a city to disappear. The fragments are consciously presented in a table-of-contents order, one after another, like a personal composer's herbarium of one complex plant seen from different angles.

I would like it to be perceived exactly that way.