Threshold activates a dialectic between melody and instrument. The work takes up a particular historical construction of melody, that of nineteenth century Western art music. In pianist-composer Sigismund Thalberg's influential formulation, the skilled performer "bends the [instrumental] mechanism to the will of the art [of singing]." The goal here is to suppress the instrument's materiality, rendering it a blank slate for the inscription of melodic content.

The present composition, scored for string trio, aims to complicate this metaphysics of melody, bringing it into interchange with the material contingencies of instrumental sound production. Instrumentalists' left hand fingers outline fragmentary traces of melody, while their bows move extremely slowly (at the fastest, one bow stroke in 48 seconds) across the strings. In the resulting sound, bowing techniques perforate and destabilize pitches fingered by the left hand. Melody submerges into its material substrate, galvanizing tensions between incompatible modes of listening.