New Music USA Online Library

Aphorisms I

Stan Grill

Many authors and thinkers have written aphorisms, but few excelled at this art.  The ability to capture a complex thought in a simple, pithy phrase is harder than it looks!  Leading up to my writing this string quartet, I had picked through a few volumes of aphorisms by François La Rochefoucauld, Franz Kafka and Oscar Wilde.  While the format of these books, in places, has some semblance of order, mostly each maxim or aphorism stands on its own.  The idea intrigued me for music, as such a method of organization runs so contrary to how music is usually structured – and I wanted to experiment with a piece that flowed from one brief idea to another, without interruption or development.

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