Jan Swafford

Garden of Forking Paths No. 2

Jan Swafford composed The Garden of Forking Paths No. 2 Lines for Flute and Piccolo Trumpet in 1970. The idea for the work came from a fantasy story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a write creates an apparently incomprehensible novel of that same name in which, as it turns out, every moment of a store, as of life, lies at a forking path that can go in many directions. In Borges's imaginary, impossible novel, they do. In the first movement, the piccolo trumpet plays an insistent fanfare; the flute replies with sultry glissandos, and the paths never meet. The second movement has both instruments playing the same melody, but not in the same rhythm. In the last movement, the two subsume the characters of all the music that came before, but each still on his or her own path. This work is dedicated to Jan Gippo, flute, and Jim Thomson, trumpet. The two premiered the piece at the New England Conservatory in 1971.