This work was premiered by the Mivos Quartet on January 18th, 2012 @ Littlefield Art Space in New York City
Mivos gave the second performance at Issue Project Room in NYC on Feb.29th, 2012
It was recorded in December of 2011 and will be released later this year
For Proust, it is the active attempts of the intellect to reconstruct the past that inevitably fail, falling short of the experience of the time they sought to recover. In my quartet, the first movement states a simple pan-diatonic theme in G major, to which the ensuing movements attempt to return and which is never again stated in full. The inevitable failure--as the work becomes increasingly dissonant and synthetic, making use of canon forms, twelve-tone structures, indeterminate pitches and micro-tonal interpolations--is generated by each movement's subsequent effort to retain the ground of the opening theme. This very failure is also the source of thematic variation and motivic development throughout the work.
The first three movements are played continuously and are each "threaded" through by a sustained B in the viola--this is intended to provide a unifying element which is then importantly absent by the end of the work. At the start of the "Introduction" (measure 2) is stated a short 8 note theme in the upper voice of the viola. This is supported by a pedal of open fifths and an inverted line in the cello. This motive provides the "ground" to which the rest of the work attempts to return, or to remember. As the movements progress, and the attempts to recall the opening theme becomes more and more active, the musical material becomes increasingly synthetic, increasingly additive, and further distanced from its origins as extra elements sneak their way in and complicate the process. For instance, the second movement is a double canon composed around a 9-tone row, which is itself an interpolation of the opening theme. Similarly, the third movement is derived from a 12-tone row that further interpolates the previous row.
By the fourth movement ("Deviation"), the two violins play a 23-note chromatic pattern a whole step apart, which works as a sort of disfigurement of the preceding pitch sets. This movement is composed and scored in entirely free rhythm, making no use of meter or bar notation. This is intended to produce a sort of "deviation" effect, where the performers' attempts to keep-up with the musical material are inherently thrown-off by the notational restrictions. Chance and improvisation replace focused intellectual effort as the guiding forces of the work. By the closing three movements, the structures and themes of the quartet are reduced, laid bare and stripped down to essential harmonic impulses. The return of the opening themes is only partial, as their substance has been fundamentally changed by the search. At the close, we are left short of a full recovery of the past, but rather with something new, something auto-generative. We are left only with the after-effect of the attempt to remember. Not just nostalgia, but lament as a form of invention.
-- Patrick Higgins
In November of 2011, I completed work on my second string quartet. I was interested in a kind of literary compositional style, in developing a music that unfolds like a piece of text. This seven movement palindromic composition takes its initial impetus from Marcel Proust's remark that memory lies "beyond the reach of the intellect." Somewhere buried, perhaps, in the scent, the touch, the feel of an object from our past--here is the terrain of lost time. And there is no promise of our ever finding it. The possibility that our memories are somehow beyond us, without a guarantee of being recovered, I found especially fruitful ground for musical exploration. I was drawn, as well, to Theodor Adorno's observation that "dissonance has no memory" and began to conceive of a multi-movement work that engaged precisely these themes. What happens when music, when dissonance attempts to "remember"?