2021
violin, viola, ‘cello, piano
written for The De Kooning Ensemble
fp — The De Kooning Ensemble, All Saints Blackheath (UK), 09-07-2021
sp — The De Kooning Ensemble, St. Mary’s Weymouth (UK), 27-10-2021
Programme note
In June 2020 I made a short piece for piano entitled six bars, which is concerned with listening to the full decay of a number of notes and chords. The material in that piece, to some degree, found its way into everything I did for the next year or so.
This piano quartet is about listening to those chords in natural string harmonics both with and without the equally-tempered piano, and about acknowledging the nature of those chords (and the piano itself) as sounds which decay, while allowing the sustaining strings to dialogue with and counterbalance this decay.
This quartet was written concurrently with my recent orchestral piece, dream hollow, and as such they both explore similar pathways — juxtaposition and superposition of simple layers, openness, slowness, breathing, fragility, materiality.
tags
ensemble-small, 10’-15’
recording of the premiere:
video of the second performance: