Passion’s Continuum for String Quartet (2023)
[unmastered live performances... official recording release TBD]

This work was commissioned by and written for the Cassatt String Quartet. In searching for an idea on how to conceive this work, I turned to a collection of poetry titled Chords of Dust written by my father, Paul Anthony De Ritis (1922-2000), in which several phrases referencing sound can be found, including the quartet’s title, Passion’s Continuum. The bulk of this work was composed while I was on Christmas holiday in Berkeley, California, during December 2022. I was fortunate to have a quiet place to work at Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), where I spent a great deal of time while earning my Ph.D.

Passion's Continuum consists of five movements. “On Chapels of Doom” is based upon rhythmic transcriptions and spectral harmonies derived from chapel bells recorded in the Italian Abruzzo, the region where my father was born. “Our Conflicts Carom Close to Violin Drones” is derived from the spectra of various timpani gestures, struck, rolled, and transposed. I then imagined these sounds bouncing throughout the stone buildings and alleyways of medieval Siena, Italy, late at night, a city where I spent my summers between 2000 and 2006. These gestures then give way to a series of slow moving but energy filled violin drones, which create a kind of meditation before once again giving way to re-imagined timpani booms. “The Tinkling of Orchestral Bells” imagines the string quartet as a kind of illusory glockenspiel or other collection of dreamed-up bell-like sounds that leverage muted natural and artificial harmonics interspersed with pizzicati open strings. “On a Cello of Sorrow, Cymbals Will Harrow” references the acoustic envelope and spectra of several cymbals, and miscellaneous metallic devices, struck and scraped in various ways, gestures that serve as bookends to a sorrowful cello solo.

The final movement, "Sweet Remembrance of the Just," takes its title from a phrase that, as far as I can tell, is a reference from Psalm 112:6 of Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms of David (1696). This phrase is found at the onset of my father's poem. I found a profound reference to this phrase in the New York Times published on April 25, 1865, written by someone witnessing the "general mourning" of the crowd at the religious observances at the capital upon the death of Abraham Lincoln. This article closes with the fully referenced phrase, "The sweet remembrance of the just, Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust." This provides a context for my father's struggle with the meaning of life and religion, which pervades so much of his poetry. For me, after composing this movement based upon a transcription of a sketch built from keyboard improvisations, which in turn became focused as a series of "remembrances" that my father (or perhaps those from a crowd of mourners) might have had when grappling with such profound questions. As a result, I sought to include several written descriptions that reference religiosity, ultimately to a "solemn and overpowering" effect (to once again quote from the article on the aforementioned religious observances).

This movement, and the content that it struggles with, now takes on an even deeper personal meaning, as I struggle with the death of my younger brother Louis Michael De Ritis and his wife Renée in a tragic boating accident off the south shore of Long Island on September 3, 2023.

Sweet Remembrance Of The Just

On A Cello Of Sorrow, Cymbals Will Harrow

The Tinkling Of Orchestral Bells

Our Conflicts Carom Close To Violin Drones

On Chapels Of Doom

Still Water

I grew up on a dead-end street. I failed to understand the metaphor.

Versions 2.1 and 2.2 differ only in pedaling.

backstory 1 [version 2.2 - pianos - to be played softly]

Kristin

Not background music. Not foreground music.


middleground 2 [version 2] [CAUTION - DO NOT INCREASE VOLUME]

Nights

positry
1.  the act of trying to posit
2. the act of positing
3. the art of positing
4. there is no such word