Name: Phenotype for String Quartet - Premiere by Nate May
Duration: 5 min 15 s
Description: Performed in Pavia, Italy by Quartetto Indaco as part of the highSCORE festival.

This is the second track I had composed for the Chiptune Cafe's "Hot Coffee" Chip Jam.

(Cover Art by ZuggyArt)

Willow (FamiTracker)

This is the first track I had composed for the Chiptune Cafe's "Hot Coffee" Chip Jam.

(Cover Art by ZuggyArt)

Ujico (FamiTracker)

This is the third track I had composed for the Chiptune Cafe's "Hot Coffee" Chip Jam.

(Cover Art by ZuggyArt)

Roxanne (FamiTracker)

Performed in Pavia, Italy by Quartetto Indaco as part of the highSCORE festival.

Phenotype for String Quartet - Premiere

Video: https://youtu.be/qnpk_mk57-M

“…eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood...."

Thomas De Quincey (1821)

The title of my string quartet piece is drawn from Thomas De Quincey’s "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1821). "Confessions" is an autobiographical account of De Quincey’s struggles with opium addiction. He took the drug in the form of laudanum, a popular opium tincture. De Quincey meditates first on the pleasures of opium, describing its effectiveness in aiding sleep, fostering a sense of wellbeing and assuaging psychological disquiet. He goes on to chart the decline of such pleasures into nightmarish visions, hallucinations and physical frailty. In the early 1800s little was known about the effects of narcotics: "Confessions" was one of the first publications to offer a systematic study of their regular use.

I was intrigued by the fact that Beethoven’s late quartets were published in the same decade as De Quincey’s famous work. In 'The Opium-Eaters' I respond to these two outputs, quietly exploring the idea of the epiphanic moment. The performers are asked to face inwards, a position that string quartets would have adopted when playing from the table music stands of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

'The Opium-Eaters' was premiered by the Escher String Quartet in Taplin Auditorium, Princeton, March 2016. This recording is shared with their kind permission.

The Opium-Eaters (2016)

dedicated to Peter Adriaansz

commissioned by the Shanghai Conservatory and Shanghai Symphony

recorded by David Yi and the Yale Philharmonia with the inimitable JX Yu singing.

Electronics by Patrick McMinn

Ascending for voice, orchestra, and sinewaves

full show here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/NTSRadio/zuli-gattonero-6th-june-2017/

Gattonero X NTS (Zuli show 06.06.17)

Pray Away for orchestra (2018) 
Yale Philharmonia
Julian Pellicano, conductor 
12/6/18, Woolsey Hall, New Haven, CT

Program Notes:
Pray Away is about unpeeling layers of personal shame to find authenticity. I found the idea of self-invention as self-reinvention, articulated by Didier Eribon in his memoir Returning to Reims, particularly inspiring: “Our past is still there in the present. So we remake ourselves, we re-create ourselves (a task that is never finished, always needing to be taken up again), but we do not make ourselves, we do not create ourselves.”

Pray Away (2018) for orchestra

solo set live 3/30 @ deep blue, vancouver

Phenotype for String Quartet - Premiere

Nate May

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