Last night, I heard an excellent composition by Jennifer Jolley for nine violas, called Bullet Time. Very sonorous and lively. Nine violas! I just want my violist friends to know that when nine of them get together, there is something to play besides softball.

                    —Steven Cahn, Associate Professor
                                of Music Theory at CCM

According to Wikipedia, bullet time is a special and visual effect that refers to a digitally-enhanced simulation of variable-speed (ex. slow motion, time-lapse, etc.) photography used in films, broadcast advertisements, and video games. It is characterized both by its extreme transformation of time (slow enough to show normally imperceptible and unfilmable events, such as flying bullets) and space (by way of the ability of the camera angle to move around the scene at a normal speed while events are slowed).

I had these visual effects in mind while writing this piece. It begins in a slow, timeless tempo, shifts to a rapid tempo partway through, then ends with the tempos combined.