Momenta String Quartet’s performance of Leos Janacek’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ recalls a beautiful cycle of artistic re-appropriation, of interpretation and representation of a piece, of what it means for work to recycle—not as the Pop artists did simply through image culture—but the transition, the loss in translation, and that loss or miss lending itself to a different sort of re-creation through which the work evolves onto a different level of its totality, into something almost otherly. It is this liminal dance between the original and the simulacrum that makes art subliminal, that allows ideas to expand in breadth beyond the limits of a singular medium, evolving unto, into, and passed themselves. And that is what Janacek’s sonata was an affirmation of. Each instrument was its own separate body that interrupted and resisted the piecing together of all of them in harmony. The music at times became planes of sound masses that crescendo and collide into what Luigi Rossolo terms “noise-sounds” before plateauing into more classical pacing and rhythm. The weakness, however, of this “organized sound” lies in this valley from which builds a mountainous chaos only to always retreat back to the same horizon line. This classical backbone—stiff and archaic—exists as a narrative voiceover that pulls us to the 1890’s of Tolstoy’s book rather than the 1920s of Janacek’s life. This underlining classical current is a nostalgia for the romantic, the pastoral, that is disrupted by the Modern man, the mechanistic, robust, disorderly human noise that pervades even the sounds of nature claiming, reclaiming, and remaking them into their own. This rising crescendo abruptly stops—and it is here about the static, the stasis, the period, the void, the space between notes that this sonata really explores. I would be curious to understand what it means to have listened to Beethoven’s sonata then read Tolstoy’s story before having listened to the Janacek’s sonata, and compare that to the inverse experience of listening to Janacek’s sonata then reading Tolstoy’s story, and lastly listening to Beethoven’s sonata—would it be a flashforward, a flashback, or simply the accumulation of experiencing the now, the timelessness of our presence?