time passes is taken from my song-cycle god-song, which is scored for mezzo soprano, flute, alto trombone, cello and piano. It was commissioned by New Macnaghten Concerts and first performed at St. John's, Smith Square, London on 4th December 1986. The pianist was Stephen Pruslin, who played the piece with magisterial panache. In 1991, when I revised the score slightly, I made time passes available as a stand-alone piano piece.

The text of god-song is taken from the York Mystery Plays, and covers the whole of time: from the mythical moment of Creation to the Last Judgement. It has thirty-three short movements (plus introduction and prologue; so thirty-five in all) and lasts about forty minutes.  time passes is the eighteenth of these movements, and the still centre of the piece. It covers the time elapsed (hence the title) between the banishment from Eden and the moment when Doubting Thomas demands evidence of Jesus' resurrection.

time passes is in two parts. The first is entirely linear, and attempts to create the effect of expanding ripples in water (or space/time), using a cycle of notes heard in compressed form and spaced far apart, using a scale of expansion/contraction based on the Fibonacci sequence. These cycles are superimposed, creating patterns analogous to a system of expending ripples. The second part of the piece takes chords made from the note-cycles in the first part ( some compressed, others spaced apart). and lays them out in a sequence of durations derived from the expansion/contraction scale used earlier. This sounds horribly complicated when put into words, but is musically quite simple and can be heard quite clearly.