Prélude À L’Après-Midi D’Un Faune Temporal Experience

The Prelude opens with a delicate, descending flute. It seems to scale up and down in pitch in a very fluent manner, while a harp escalates the intensity of the music ever so slightly. Even the horn in the background accentuates the flute in a rather subtle way – it sounds like it is swaying back and forth. In fact, as the many strings enter, my mind feels as if it were kinetic. Yet, when the clarinet enters, the sounds seem to descend into a sort of bouncy hush; the dynamics often appear to be fluctuating from a gentle tip-toe to a moving and powerful composition. As the piece continues, I am trying to put a finger on the general tempo of the song, but it seems that the speed is constantly slowing. As I listen my way past the second third of the song, it is evident that the overall tempo and dynamics are declining. However, there seem to be short, sporadic bursts of a bubbly melody played by some sort of woodwind, which livens the music ever so slightly. Throughout the entire composition, there is a theme of cycling from slow and quiet parts to faster, more elevated styles of sound production. During the slow parts, time felt as if it were passing a bit slower and more smoothly than the faster parts, during which time seemed to speed by. Though, perhaps I am feeling this quickened pace of time during the faster sections only because these sections tend to be more succinct. Nevertheless, the piece had quite an impact on my perception of time.