About this work:
Beginning with Time: String Quartet no. 3
This quartet takes its title from a seemingly casual phrase in "To a Reason," one of the prose poems in Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations:
A tap of your finger on the drum precipitates all the sounds and begins
the new harmony.
One step of yours is the rise of a human race and its onward march.
Your face turns away: the new love! Your face turns back: the new love!
“Change our fate, sift out the plagues, beginning with time,” the children
sing to you. “Raise no matter where the substance of our fortunes and
our wishes,” they beg of you.
Arrival from always, you who will go everywhere.
(Translation by the composer)
The poem intimates that we are all children who plead in song for a change of fate. Moved by music--a tap on the drum that releases a world of sound--we ask for the change to begin with a sifting out, the separation of the scourges of time from its potential to incubate "the new harmony" and "the new love."
My quartet aims to give musical form to this sifting out. It answers to what may be the primary feature of our relationship to time: the wish to have enough time, time enough desires and plans to be fulfilled, to come out right. The quartet reorders its musical time to accommodate that wish. Its two movements occur in a five-part alternation rather than a two-part sequence. Both have a slow basic tempo but they pace themselves in contrasting, complemengary ways. The first movement is volatile and tends to quicken its note motion. The second movement is tranquil and tends to linger. The recurrences of these movements relive them, reshape them, and expand the time allotted to them. Within this large pulsation, each movement eventually finds the time it wants and needs, both in itself and as the complenent of the other.
The first movement aims to reconcile longing and urgemcy, soaring amd swirling, in summoning up the "arrival of always": transfigured time. The second movement aims to reconcile an affinity for tender melody with a pensive flow of counterpoint offset by chordal passages. The first movement is essentially the same each time we hear it, but it is also new because its recurrences change which instrument plays what part, thus transforming the texture and sonority and sometimes the melody and harmony. The second movement changes differently. Upon returning it recalls its first occurrence but only to leave it behind. As time passes, it becomes clear that neither movement can arrive amywhere, let alone go everywhere, without the help of the other. Only when the returning second movement comes to rest can the first movement, which has already returned once, return again and do the same. Only together can the can the two movements plead fully for a time, a someday, in which the wishes of the children might be granted.
The pains and possibilities of time also shaped the composition of this quartet, which extended over a period of twelve years.
Duration: 20-21 minutes.