violin, cello and piano
Commission: Trio Fibonacci, with support from the CCA
À Ligeti — in Erinnerung — ainsi qu’au Trio Fibonacci
This piece was commissioned by Fibonacci Trio with the help of Canada Council for the Arts. Grateful thanks to Julie-Anne Derome, Gabriel Prynn and André Ristic.
Qualia: The subjective qualities of conscious experience (plural of the latin singular ‘quale’).
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. ( ) -in: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Qualia (singular, “quale”) is a term introduced by C. I. Lewis (1929) to stand for “recognizable qualitative characters of the given”. Lewis’s examples were red, blue, round, and loud. Although the predicates for these qualia are also used to denote properties of physical objects, Lewis was explicit that properties of physical objects are not qualia: qualia are properties only of the given. To give a helpful, although not perfectly unambiguous example, the roundness of a coin is not a quale, but if we look at the coin straight on, so that it looks round to us, then the roundness that characterizes our visual experience will be a quale. ( ) -in: Iowa State University Documentation
- Score available at CMC, Région du Québec.
- Recording: available at SMCQ’s office
