Contemporary string quartets

Mixed Friends 49

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

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