At National Sawdust, composer Huang Ruo presents the New York City premiere of *A DUST IN TIME*, performed with soprano Kelly Clarke and pianist Joanne Kang. The piece sits in the classical song tradition while turning its attention to time at human scale: memory, erosion, and what remains after an instant passes. Heard in this setting, it also reads as a marker of New York’s ongoing role as a testing ground for contemporary vocal music. One clear strength is its refusal to treat “new” as a style and instead as a way of listening.