New Music USA Online Library

                                  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 time as a gift from time as a scourge. 

How can that be done?  My quartet tries to imagine an answer by reordering musical time.  The work is in two movements, but they are played as a five-part alternation rather than a two-part sequence.  With each  recurrence, the movements return to their starting point and go on to remake themselves.  They change their fate, beginning with time.  They accomplish this, if they do, by working together.  Each forms a response to
the other as their alternation unfolds.   

The second movement (segments 2 and 4) undergoes a large and full transformatiom.  The transformation of the first movement (segmemts 1, 3, and 5) takes a different form.  The movement is essentially the same each time we hear it, but it is also new because its recurrences change which instrument plays what part. The music's texture and sonority continuously evolve  into new forms and cumulatively bring the melody and harmony to follow their example. .     
  
The pains and possibilities of time also shaped the composition of this quartet, which extended over a period of twelve years (2008-2020, with a few further changes in 2025).

Duration: 20-21 minutes.