PLAYING PATTERNS: PERCUSSION & STRINGS

The Sanskrit title Asanga means ‘freedom from attachment’ I wrote the piece as a gift for Robyn Schulkowsky on the death of her father. It was written with no conscious techniques or concept. The first performance was in Stockholm in 1998.

© Kevin Volans

Imagine walking through a shopping mall, a large warehouse, an airport terminal, Ikea. These are spaces with seemingly no end or beginning. They unfold in one unbroken path, creating a sense of limitless interior within a bounded, enclosed space. As you walk details change, but the feeling of being within the same, vast, open space remains. This is a very modern feeling. In thinking about this, I felt resonance with the idea of moving through a musical space. I often experience music similarly: contained by the form, yet also a sense of being within one stretch of a long, continuous stream of musical thought. For my piece, Continuous Interior, I imagined a stroll through this kind of limitless space, with each movement being a stop along the way. On this walk we experience three distinct places. The first movement draws out waves of rocking strings against a ringing vibraphone texture. Long lines emerge as echoes of accented  ibraphone tones float plaintively above the undulating string texture. The second movement is slow and lyrical, somewhat wistful yet also mysterious and dreamy. The final movement pushes forward with a churning, dance-like energy, reveling in the vibraphone sound against the clock-like, mechanical pulsation of the string quartet. The piece ends, certainly, but perhaps it could also go on and on.

© Robert Honstein

Sundial, scored for string quartet and percussion, engages with the tradition of works for string quartet ‘plus one’—works like W.A. Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Franz Schubert’s Cello Quintet D956, not to mention the numerous piano quintets.

Like much of my recent music, this work explores ideas of resonance and brightness. I treat the five voices a little bit like a sustain pedal on a piano. In many passages, the strings elongate the percussion sounds and vice versa, so much so that the instruments on stage might sound like one polyphonic organism arranged not in a hierarchy but in a symbiotic web in which the roles of the instruments are balanced and consistently in flux.

The form possesses a shape similar to its namesake: the five musicians project a series of musical shadows that, unbroken, reveal the passage of time in the shape of an inverted arc. The work is made of two distinct types of music: rocking music—fast, pulsing dual harmonies that sway back and forth—and cyclic music—slightly off-kilter contrapuntal figurations that blossom over long stretches of time. Only in the final minutes of the work does the music break out of these two types of material, ascending to a ringing, intensely bright conclusion.

Although the piece is not explicitly autobiographical, I wrote it during a period that saw a number of immense personal changes, not the least of which was the birth of my first child. The almost blinding joy of having him around has been a counterbalance to the bizarre, shadowy last two years. To me, this duality is the essence of the piece: it is at once a rippling shadow and a meridian sun.

© Samuel Adams