Frozen Dreams – A Reflection on Sound, Memory, and the Uncertainty of Time

Music exists in a paradox: it is both frozen and ephemeral, tangible and elusive. The act of composition is an attempt to capture something that is already dissolving. My orchestral work Frozen Dreams emerges from this paradox, reimagining the sound world of my earlier Frozen Dreams for string quartet and expanding it into an orchestral landscape that explores the fragility of perception and the shifting nature of reality itself. And what is a dream, if not a memory that will be? Dreams are the subconscious writing the past into the future, fragmenting time so that what has been and what has yet to come coexist in the present moment, not bound to physical reality.

As I returned to this material, I found myself drawn to the idea that an event becomes fully real only when it is perceived—an idea that resonates, in a poetic sense, with aspects of quantum realities and the so-called “collapse” of the wavefunction. In quantum mechanics, a system can be said to exist in a superposition of possible states, crystallizing into a definite outcome when it interacts with a measuring context. Similarly, though purely as a metaphor, music unfolds as a wide field of potentialities, taking on a unique shape for each listening ear.

Orchestration is, in many ways, an exploration of this uncertainty. What happens when sound, once confined to four voices, is stretched across the vast sonic universe of an orchestra? Does it retain its essence, or does it become something else entirely? Here, we confront the deeply personal and subjective experience of perception. No two listeners will hear Frozen Dreams in the same way, just as no two dreams are identical. A chord might sound luminous to one listener, foreboding to another. A silence might be filled with anticipation, or with loss. The orchestra, with its myriad colours and shifting densities, becomes a dreamscape in which meaning is perpetually in flux.

We often think of memories as something fixed, securely behind us—but they are as fluid as the dreams that shape them. In a poetic sense, we are always “remembering the future,” allowing our subconscious to blend past and future into the present. In Frozen Dreams, musical ideas resurface like echoes of something once known—or yet to be—blurring the boundaries of time. A theme emerges, vanishes, then returns changed—as if recalled from a dream, yet belonging to a moment still waiting to unfold.

Though the title Frozen Dreams suggests stasis, this work is, at its core, about movement—about the delicate tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between what is possible and what is inevitable. It is a meditation on the way time is layered in our minds: past, present, and future coexisting in an endless spiral.

Perhaps, in the end, this music does not seek to answer the questions it poses. Instead, it invites the listener to dwell within them—to step into the dream and, for a fleeting moment, let the boundaries of time and self dissolve.

— Lera Auerbach, 2025

The orchestral Frozen Dreams grows from material associated with Auerbach’s earlier String Quartet No. 10, but the change of medium transforms the musical space. Four concentrated voices become an orchestral dreamscape of winds, low winds, horns and trumpets, timpani, three percussionists, two harps, celesta, piano and strings.

The percussion palette is unusually tactile and spectral: waterphone, tam-tams, stones, temple blocks, crystal glasses, glockenspiel, vibraphone and marimba. These sonorities reinforce the work’s central tension between the tangible and the elusive—sounds that seem physically present even as their resonance slips away.

The result is not a literal orchestration of the quartet but a new reflection on the same dream-world: an exploration of how identity changes when remembered material is heard through a different body.