Writ­ten for the Quatuor Bozzini, the title of this piece can be loosely trans­lated as “To go around one­self, to con­form one­self”. Those con­cepts play a role in the musi­cal mate­r­ial on sev­eral dif­fer­ent lev­els: har­monic mate­r­ial, rhyth­mic struc­ture, form, the push and pull of musi­cal tra­di­tion, the choices the per­form­ers have to make, and so forth. My goal was to work in the space on the edge of com­fort, where there is enough famil­iar­ity for both per­form­ers and audi­ence to get into the piece, but also a strong musi­cal chal­lenge that pushes us to the “tran­scen­dence” expe­ri­ence that I seek in music.

In this piece, I return to pre­dom­i­nantly quar­ter­tonal har­monies for the first time in a few years. How­ever, the har­monic frame­work also fits loosely into G-sharp minor/B major. The intent, like in much of my micro­tonal work, is that the quar­ter­tones go largely unno­ticed by the casual lis­tener. I build up a type of pseudo-Renaissance struc­ture, trans­par­ent and smooth, using quar­ter­tones not to approx­i­mate just into­na­tion, but rather to cre­ate a sort of “what-if”, alternate-reality har­monic system.

This piece reflects my ongo­ing inter­ests in sec­tional forms, doing away with tran­si­tional mate­r­ial, and the chal­leng­ing of aes­thetic assump­tions. There is no attempt to relate any of the mate­ri­als of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have focused on a broad ges­ture—that of a long dimin­u­endo—that goes from begin­ning to end. Within that ges­ture are a series of thirty-one frag­ments, some with local rela­tion­ships to adjoin­ing frag­ments, some with­out. No struc­tures or orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples have been used that are not imme­di­ately appar­ent to the ear, and each sec­tion is com­posed intu­itively with regard to pitch, rhythm, tone colour, and phras­ing. The piece also includes sev­eral the­atri­cal ele­ments, and is there­fore best appre­ci­ated in a live performance.

Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to cre­ate or not cre­ate his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic man­ner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to cre­ate hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.

Four Pieces for Accor­dion and String Quar­tet was writ­ten between the sum­mer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Cana­dian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watch­ing her lover die of can­cer. Four Pieces is ded­i­cated to my grand­mother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accor­dion­ist and died of can­cer when I was a child.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic sys­tem with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

lis­ten to Viñes Pass­ing Through

A mash-up by Steve Lay­ton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spec­tral & En Ver­laine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Pee­bles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet