The 2015 season of Music for Contemplation begins Saturday March 14 with a rare performance of expanding space in limited time for solo violin by Korean composer Kunsu Shim. The work will be performed by New York-based violinist Erik Carlson. Composed in 1994 and lasting approximately 90-minutes, expanding space in limited time rigorously explores the boundary between sound and silence, hovering throughout at the edge of audibility. Widely considered a landmark of the international Wandelwieser collective of which Shim was a member between 1994 and 1999, the composer has described the work as “like a lonely and long swim in an open sea.” In a detailed account of an early performance of the work in Chicago, composer Michael Pisaro wrote “it took 20 minutes for me to hear any sound from the violin at all. Once I did start to hear it, over the course of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich: there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than in the statistical complexities of Xenakis (or the black metal of Burzum).”