The origins of the movement titles are in idiosyncratic phrases taken from Virginia Woolf ’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. The single words have been abstracted from these origins so as not to reduce the musical narrative to the events suggested by the phrase. Instead, each movement suggests a mood, leaving an open interpretation of the narrative.

i. often he went without a greatcoat in winter
ii. (and now again she liked him warmly)
iii. sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence
iv. with cyclamen and wild violets
v. growing greyer-eyed

Virginia Fragments: v. greyer-eyed

Virginia Fragments: iv. wild

Virginia Fragments: iii. somnolence

Virginia Fragments: ii. she

Virginia Fragments: i. often

simple songs, written for Rowan Hawitt in September 2018, is a meditation on the ways in which simple melodic lines and harmony can revolve, evolve, and repeat. The central movement is a soliloquy.

simple songs

simple song #2

simple song #1

Recorded by George Fu, Pianist, at the Royal Academy of Music, January 2021.

In August 1870, after 8 years of exchanging correspondence, the minister, author, abolitionist, and publisher Thomas Wentworth Higginson and poet Emily Dickinson met at her home in Amherst. He was only there for an hour, during which he sat, unable to get a word in edgewise, as this faint, childlike figure spoke unbroken about her life and her thoughts. He left, feeling she had “an excess of tension…[from] an abnormal life…She was much too enigmatical a being for me to solve in an hour’s interview, and an instinct told me that the slightest attempt at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell; I could only sit still and watch, as one does in the woods…” 

After he left, he received a letter, which began:

'Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits.'

I’m struck by an image of this woman, seated at her desk by the window of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing in her private journal these little poems, these little crystalline perfections, of such precision, clarity, and profound humanity, poems which would echo out like ice cracking on a frozen pond in a Massachusetts winter. And to this woman, whose inner thoughts would become part of the American consciousness, her dear friend Thomas’ act of listening in that single hour they would share together was Enough.

I imagine this piece to be something like those poems. A tiny, human sound resonating over a quiet flurry of activity, asking to be listened to.

so vast a sweetness/Amherst - George Fu, Pianist

In 1939, when he began the painting The Sunlit Terrace, Pierre Bonnard and his partner, Marthe de Méligny, of 50 years lived in Normandy, France. The next year, the Nazis would invade France, forcing Bonnard and his wife, in their 70s, to flee to Vichy. Between 1939 and 1946, Bonnard lived under Nazi occupation and would lose a close friend, his brother, and then his wife. From his destroyed home in Normandy, after his return, he finished The Sunlit Terrace.
	The painting, however, reflects none of that experience. In orange- and violet-reds, it is a wide landscape of a garden on a summer day. On either side of the garden are two sides of a house, one with an awning and one with a window looking into a room where someone is reading.  It is a picturesque scene and typical of Bonnard, lush with color and framed by architecture. Like most of his other paintings, it is likely painted from memory.  His output is filled with candid paintings of his wife in domestic tranquility, memories of happy days, though his life was often complex and his relationships strained. Bonnard’s paintings are manufactured memories, idealized renderings of hoped-for realities.
	The Piano Sonata no. 30 in E Major, op. 109 is one of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, written after he had stopped performing due to his deafness. There is a rumor that the low trills of the B-section are the only sounds Beethoven, now significantly deaf, could hear, and only because of the incredible vibrations they would have caused. There is little to substantiate that claim, but what would hearing music have been like for Beethoven? No doubt that his inner ear was extraordinary, but his music must have sounded distant and muffled, like an echo of a distant love. 
	This string quartet is, ultimately, about memory, about how we remember, hear, process, and forget music. When, after the actual sounds have long died away, we try to recall a long-forgotten melody, and it comes back transfigured by time and distance, what does this music sound like?

____________________
Recorded June 5, 2019 in St. Mark's Church, London by 

Djumash Poulsen, Violin
Roberts Balanas, Violin
Varinia Oyola-Rebaza, Viola
Sarah Gait, Cello

String Quartet

Jon Paul Mayse

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