I kept restarting this piece over the course of a couple of years, while it was subject to a series of pandemic-era postponements. None of my ideas felt right for these times of precarity, suffering, conflict, and shattering confusion. It was, quite frankly, difficult to determine this work’s reason for being. Finally, in a notebook last summer I wrote, “I thought about disunities and about managed parallel synchronies — say, pairwise coordinations in rhythm, while there might also be a relation...