54 minutes
2018

It sometimes surprises people to learn that “melody” is a concept I think about often in reference to my music. Not that it’s the sort of music that has people walking away humming what they’ve heard; but, I find myself thinking about Christian Wolf’s comment (as reported by Feldman) that “eventually everything becomes melody.” This is a very interesting contention in a musical environment that eschews, in Cage-ian terms, traditional notions of continuity. It speaks to a realization and acceptance of the way we experience musical time, even if there’s a great deal of elasticity in that. (In its way, this observation is similar to the recognition that, harmonically speaking, if repeated enough times, any harmony will acquire the status of “tonic.”)

In any event, here’s a piece for piano and string quartet which is, really, a single, long melody. Executed in perfect unison throughout, resonance is found in the permanently depressed sustain pedal of the piano and coloristic variety in the many ways the string instruments attack and sustain a sound. Even though it is “linear,” in a sense—though in a very different sense compared to the immediately preceding work for flute and piano (2017)—perhaps the repetitions, the long duration, and the nature of the modest melodic shapes themselves allow for a multifaceted kind of listening experience that breaks free from or somehow goes beyond the confines of the melody itself. Ultimately there’s this simple consideration: these are the sounds I was interested in hearing, and no others.