John Burge

Oscillations is the final piece of the John Burge's collection of eight piano solos titled, Piano Reflections.  Please see the collection for more details to order this collection.

The work is just over 8 minutes in duration.  Below is a video that was made of the composer playing the piece recorded at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Queen's University, Feb. 2016:

Background story to this piece:

With specific regards to Oscillations, it was written in tribute to Dr. Arthur B. McDonald, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in recognition of his co-winning of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Along with Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, this particular prize honors their key contributions to the experiments that demonstrated that neutrinos change identities or “oscillate”. Dr. McDonald’s research took place at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), a cutting-edge research facility located two kilometres underground in an active nickel mine. The experiment demonstrated that neutrinos from the sun were not disappearing on their way to earth and were captured with a different identity when arriving at SNO. Meanwhile, Dr. Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. This “metamorphosis” requires that neutrinos have mass and collectively their findings solved a puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades, and clearly showed that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe.

The request for a musical acknowledgement of this award came from Dr. Alan Harrison, Provost of Queen’s University at the time. Queen’s University, like the city of Kingston where it is located, is a relatively close-knit community and John Burge knew Art McDonald prior to his becoming a Nobel laureate, as they are both fellow members of the Royal Society of Canada but also from occasionally seeing each other at concerts.  Indeed, Art’s wife Janet is a retired pianist and piano teacher and John and Janet are both members of the Kingston branch of the Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association.  It is for this reason that John shaped the tribute as a solo piano composition and dedicated the work to both Art and Janet.