String Quartet No. 2

This piece is by far the earliest on the record, and showcases my first forays into a number of looser and semi-aleatoric compositional techniques. The piece was largely written while I was studying with John Corigliano, and these techniques were some of the most important things I learned from him. In particular, he taught me to allow rhythmic events to be notated—and thus performed—relatively rather then prescriptively. It was like a bolt of lightning when he first brought this up.

I was writing the primal, violent music of the middle of the song, and I wanted the brutal violin solos to sound like they were in a different tempo, a different world, than the angry viola/cello ostinato beneath them. I was notating complex rhythms to give this impression (not unlike a simple version of a lot of Elliot Carter's work, though I wasn't terribly aware of this at the time). He asked me whether I cared that everything line up the same way everytime, and I realized I didn't (unlike Carter's work), and he asked "So why don't you just tell the bottom instruments to keep repeating the pattern and simply instruct the violins to play at a slightly faster tempo?" It seems terribly obvious to me now, but it honestly hadn't ever occurred to me. I immediately rewrote vast chunks of the piece to take advantage of these new ideas, saving straightforward rhythm and meter for the parts of the work that were supposed to sound more fully "composed."

I had just moved from Oklahoma to New York to begin my doctoral studies, and the ensuing confusion, combined with Corigliano's frustration with my inability to write better melodies, put me into something of a writer's block. It reminded me of the "Great Sleep" that the Jack Burden character from All the King's Men refers to. I think this is part of what inspired the idea to let the piece be about the compositional process, since I was, necessarily, particularly analytically concerned with precisely that world. Rather than try to write a full and coherent piece in my most comfortable style, I let the incomplete fragments and ideas from my initial sketches simply coexist and occassionally interrupt each other. The resulting sense of partial fragmentation and genre confusion sounds to me like a predecessor to the outright fractures and broken music that has become a primary aspect of my music ever since.