echoes in the grain
Piece Information
Instrumentation: 2 string quartets,
in remote locations
Duration: ~15 minutes
Date: © 2023
Commissioned by:
The Juilliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts
Since the premiere was made possible by musicians from Cremona, I specifically chose a madrigal which was written while Monteverdi still lived in Cremona. The piece is written so that two quartets in distant locations are able to play and collaborate in real time without reliance on improvisatory or aleatoric techniques for their parts to work together. The live quartet is recorded and fed to the headphones of the remote quartet. That signal is then fed back to the live venue. This creates an “echo” which determines the pulse for the music which both quartets can find in real-time. As the live and remote quartets intertwine, quotations of Monteverdi rise and recede in the texture creating a sense of shared memories becoming more clear and fading away just before they can be fully grasped.
Program note:
Echoes in the Grain is a piece about inherited memory. While writing it I was thinking a great deal about how our recall of an event or person can distort given enough time and distance. This is true in our own lives but also across generations. Musical history and shared musical language can be a beautiful unifying force, but it is important to remember that this music too was at one point innovative. I set out thinking of how to engage with these echoes of innovative music long past and decided to infuse this piece with material and ideas from early works by Monteverdi.