Offsets, Drifts, and Skews for solo oboe

I composed this piece in a modernist style (old fashioned now!) that demonstrates the tall range of the oboe, its multiphonic possibilities, laser-precise characteristics of articulation, lyricism, and agility. The three terms constituting my title are related to clocks. "Offset" is the difference between the instantaneous absolute values between two clocks, "skew" is the difference between the rate of speed the clocks run, and "drift" is the rate of change of the skew value. The piece plays with these ideas through my use of rhythm and meter: think of various wheels turning at different rates of speed, each one consisting of a set of cogs spaced differently than those of other wheels. My piece was composed with two governing meters, each own possessing its own tempo, and atop these metric grids I laid down phrases of music that run at different rates of speed, implying new meters through the complex rhythms I composed. Sometimes my phrases wind down in speed, sometimes they wind up, and sometimes they "drift" into new tempos. Clock concepts also govern my use of scales in the piece. Three separate scales govern pitch in the piece, and each scale rotates into play depending on how high or low in registration (think spring tension) a particular phrase is composed.