Apricots

Written in 2020 for String Quartet (12 minutes)

Original Program Note:

This is one of the few times I’ve written a piece that is explicitly about something deeply: memory, loss, and things forgotten with age.­

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I don’t know why I was so bashful about this in the original program note, but this piece is undoubtedly a meditation on my grandmother. The hard truth is that, while my grandpa was still alive, my grandma had been going through the serious onset and difficulties of dementia. I’ll probably never tell anyone the full story of this, but I started writing this piece a few months before my grandpa died: I visited them at home in Nebraska – they hadn’t moved into assisted living yet – and we had a conversation that, while hard, offered a lot of early closure to a few things. There seemed to be a mutual understanding that the three of us would probably never be together in that room again.

I’ve never been particularly convinced that an abstract piece of music can really “express” something specific or provide the catharsis one might need when dealing with something deeply personal, but this piece is one of the few moments where I tried. I don’t think I can tell you that anything inside the piece is specifically “about” something, or representational: I can tell you that the silences and the delicate timbres don’t have anything to do with my grandma’s situation – in many ways, I would find that inappropriate, maybe even tasteless considering the seriousness… but there are notes and private homages that make this piece a little more gestural than a lot of my work.

I feel in many ways that I partially grew up in my Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Shelton, Nebraska – I even used the window in their living room as the cover of “Codex Vivere” – but this was the last time I was there while my grandpa was alive, and the last time I spoke to them, together. When I was a kid, I remember my Grandma having a sample box of jams and jellies; when I see them today, the apricot ones always remind me of her.