works with & for string quartet

Contemporary string quartets

Mixed Friends 49

seeking all that's still unsung - a collection of musings on circles & songs & tunes & speeches

I chorale canons 00:00-06:24
II 504 Wood Street (remix 1) 06:25-09:35
III blah, blah, blah (after Greta Thunberg) 09:36-17:30
IV I'm Going Home (remix 2) 17:31-21:52
V the rub: die Torschlusspanik 21:53-25:49
VI Can I Leave You? (remix 3) 25:50-29:42

The Lydian Quartet
Clara Lyon & Julia Glenn, violins
Mark Berger, viola
Joshua Gordon, cello

"seeking all that’s still unsung" is dedicated to the members of the Lydian Quartet, past & present. This piece is inspired by the world, its "current" present, both visible and acknowledged and unseen and unacknowledged. It contemplates what is missing from our world, because the passage of time has brought about evolution, extinction, forgetting, erasure, and obliteration. It imagines what changes are possible as we move into our future. If any piece of music of mine can "be" about something in my life, then this piece pretty much tells my story; it is, in effect, my life in music. "chorale canons" is a new way for me to begin a piece. In part, because this quartet has partially existed in so many forms over the last few years, and a lot has happened to me and my work during that time, it struck me as I began working on this work for the final time that the very writing of the piece needed to take all that I had created previously for this piece (the "visible and acknowledged") and undergo...perform...those acts of evolution, extinction, forgetting, erasure, and obliteration. "chorale canons" opening chord progression is typical of much of my music: non-functional, more modal than tonal, rife with symmetries and near-circular qualities, and very connected to the properties of endless voice leading. This progression is the music for the entire piece; a series of chords that melt into one another, containing all the qualities of multi-part vocal writing from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, while being nothing like that at all. The quartet contains three “remixes” of songs from The Sacred Harp songbook; "504 Wood Street," "I’m Going Home," and "Can I Leave You?" I participated in an Old Time Music Festival in upstate New York in the Summer 2010. I came upon a group of about 30-40 people jamming on "The Sacred Harp" songs, music I had seen and heard a number of times before, but never live. It was miraculous. This set in motion many things that to this day I find myself re-examining again and again: skill, desire, purpose, utility, intention, vulnerability, beauty, memory, absence, belonging. Ever since that encounter, I have been involved in this community of musicians. Two interstitial movements connect the remixes: "blah, blah, blah (After Greta Thunberg)" and "the rub: die Torschlusspanik." "blah, blah, blah (After Greta Thunberg)" takes the rhythms and pitch material from Thunberg’s speech at the 2021 Youth4Climate Conference in Milano. It was this speech where her version of the “blah, blah, blah” moniker took hold. For me, the world of new music has a lot of “blah, blah, blah” occupying it; most creative fields do. The words of Thunberg's that strike me most potently are: "We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope it. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people." In recent years, I've moved away from playing and focused on making...writing...the music I have wanted to make first and foremost and doing so with others. I don't want to be passing through this gate of life and wonder “what if,” and regret the possible realities I never even allowed to take shape. "Can I Leave You?" is a return. My remix of this touching song on the altered instruments is in a formation where all four voices are equal and different and one, looking forward...ahead.

seeking all that's still unsung (2024) for string quartet

Composed as part of the L.A. based Lyris Quartet's 2015 "Intimate Letters" commission/recording project. I imagined that if a letter is meant to be read, then music is meant to be heard. In this is 10-11 minute piece for string quartet, all the twists and turns that instigate change are begun by the second violin and viola...the first violin and cello have no option but to oblige and follow suit.

inside voice for string quartet (2015)

World premiere played by the Signum Quartet, CBSO Centre, Birmingham

Volans String Quartet No. 12 played by the Signum Quartet

Recorded by Lydian Quartet

I – NODE: Tuning Knot  00:00-03:22
II – Recently Found Fragments: Chant Loop  03:28-11:38
III – Striding Rituals: Nocturnal Gatherings for Mass Wooing  11:44-17:30
III.5 or 5.IV – Optional habits  17:43-18:40
IV – CODEX: I know I know this (…almost remembering…)  18:44-25:04
V – Turn the Corner: Post-Rapture Celebration  25:08-28:04
VI - NODE: Ex nihilo…In nihil [-for Mary Ruth-]  28:05-35:30

Treatises for an Unrecovered Past is dedicated to the Lydian String Quartet and was composed as part of their Composition Commission Award, which was made possible by the generosity and vision of Marjorie B. and Martin Cohn. It was composed in San Francisco and Cambridge and is 35 minutes long.

Treatises for an Unrecovered Past (2013-14/rev. 2017) for string quartet

V1 06 String Quartet No. 3  Tapas - VI. Six

Recorded by Momenta Quartet

Apple wood is carried as a talisman to attract love and long life and apples are and important ingredient in spells of love, immortality, and healing.-from Jane Gifford’s “The Wisdom of Trees”

In the summer of 2014, the Momenta Quartet and I spent a week at Avaloch Farm Music Institute working on the beginning of a new String Quartet. Surrounded by apple orchards at this professional musician’s retreat, musicians rehearsed all day, took walks through the woods, and spent evenings listening to each other perform. There, time slowed and was reflected in the stillness of clouds hovering over a nearby lake.String Quartet: In Irish Mythology, Emhain Abhlach (pronounced similar to Avaloch) is an island paradise of everlasting beauty whose residents danced the days away. 

String Quartet: Avaloch is a single, fifteen-minute long movement. The work is dedicated to Alfred Tauber and Deborah Sherr, who had the combined vision to create an amazing place for performers and composers to unite in the creation of new and important musical works.

String Quartet: Avaloch

1983 
4.3.3.3 – 3.4.3.1 hp, celeste, 3 perc. Strings
This early work, composed when a student at the Royal College of Music, is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s famous Jabberwocky from ‘Through the Looking Glass’. 
It is suitable for youth orchestras and presents appropriate challenges to students of c. Grade 7 and 8 standards.
This recording is of the premiere performance given by the Royal College of Music Sinfonia conducted by Christopher Adey.

Jabberwocky (1983)

Wilde Blume

Homework - 2018 - 22

[This music benefits from a full-sized loudspeaker.  Headphones will typically lack the requisite low-frequency response.] 

Artists interested in formal methods tend to get advice of two quite opposite sorts.  Purists urge presenting the structure objectively, so not gilding the lily.  Hedonists see structure as merely a spur to creativity, and thus, in the final product, best hidden (if not simply erased or discarded) by subjective, emotive elaborations.

Curiously, purity itself sometimes distracts from that kept pure.  Perception can get dominated by very general notions of rigidity, regularity, (near) repetition, and in the case of music, fatigue to the ear.  

The title advertises a middle course.   The structural idea involves Egyptian fraction decomposition of unity: ways to segment a monochord into distinct lengths to that each one vibrates as a harmonic of the unstopped string.   Using 6 segments, there exist 2320 ways to do this (ignoring the ordering of the segments).  Some of these involve segments so short that they vibrate so high that the tones will span an interval wider than the range of human hearing.  This piece enumerates the musically useful quarter of the catalog.  The sets of tones get applied both melodically and for building the timbres that project the melodies.  

 Sorted in one obvious way, the catalog has a particular natural large-scale harmonic logic.

The catalog gets embellished with rubato - changes in attack, decay, tempo, rate of tempo change and the use of repetition.   These non- structural details actually seem to make easier concentrating on the subtle particulars of the emergent microtonal harmonic progressions and the voice leading.  Despite zero connection to traditional music theory here, the C major prelude in the WTC might seem a distant ancestor.

Not Quite Gilded Lily On A Not Quite Barren Trellis (electronic)

25Jun18

Heavily influenced by the the excellent dark ambient soundscapes created by Dimensional (https://soundcloud.com/dimensionalsound)

:D

Boson Spin - Toward the Elder Sign

"the right to be forgotten" for 27 pipe seanghwang, detuned harp and string quartet (2017), was composed in collaboration with the 2017 Pacific Rim Music Festival.

It is a distilled, oversimplified understanding of the concept of "leaving that which has happened behind to fall away" that fascinates me. Perhaps the application of this "forgetting" to the events in people's lives could be the mechanism by which a piece of music unfolds. On its surface, forgetting seems to contradict the underlying principle that music is connected with acts of memory. I am asking the question: Is forgetting necessary for memory? Must everything be remembered, even if it is not recalled fully, or correctly, or is blended with other memories (real or false), or simply undergoes the transformation that happens with each simple act of recollection?

Perhaps a new beginning could emerge in the middle, or even at the end of the piece; perhaps a "musical catastrophe," instead of becoming fixed in place by a narrow application of structural function, could simply be allowed to evaporate. The opening need not be so deeply remembered and impact musical events later on, or if it does, parts of it can be forgotten. It could be part of a more spontaneous drama that unfolds, significant at the moment, but not lingering to affect all that follows.

the right to be forgotten for seanghwang, detuned harp and string quartet (2017)

This an easy way to get quick access to recent (& not-so-recent) works of mine. Contact me with any queries. REQUEST: Should you wish to play my work, I ask you include it on a program that reflect the values of belonging, and make an honest effort to be fully inclusive. Thank you.

(pronounced Road-HEE or Rhoad-DAH)

Treatises for an Unrecovered Past (2013-14/rev. 2017) for string quartet

Kurt Rohde