It seems our brains don’t store every detail we experience. When we bring a past event to mind, we have to rebuild or recreate the memory. We recall the general sense of events and fill in the details in a way that makes sense to us. Every time we recall a story or tell it to others, we inadvertently change bits of it. The next time we remember something, we might recall not the original event but some version of what we remembered the previous time. It’s like the old game of telephone where a message is whispered from person to person around a circle. The payoff comes in comparing the original message to the final version. “Memory Shifts” for viola and electronics explores that phenomenon. The “same” music is played three times; a high passage with lots of pitch bends gradually falls in register to be replaced by a relatively simple passage full of double stops. Each time this music is played, the gist of it is pretty much the same, but the details change fairly significantly. There’s something of the original that’s retained, but the exact playing techniques shift, the actual notes change, the timing and proportions of passages rebalance, and the emotional tone swings – somewhat like the memories that shift upon recall.