Everywhere the Truth Rushes In

for string quartet (20 minutes)

Like many people, I have found writing string quartets to be rather difficult. I’m not sure what it is about the genre specifically, but at the time of writing this note, I have just finished writing Homestead, which (for a number of reasons) I will eventually write extensively about elsewhere, and besides the fact that I poured myself so deeply into that work, it proved to be somewhat difficult for me to wrap my head around compositionally. Writing this piece, Everywhere the truth rushes in, was the opposite experience, and it actually poured out of me extremely quickly based off of a single idea I had.

From conception to the complete composition of this work was done over the course of about a week at Brandeis University during the 2021 Composers Conference. So much conversation, daily seminars, concerts, meeting, new people and friends and making music together. This 10-day experience was just an amazing exercise and artistic affirmation, so I think fertile soil grew this piece rather quickly… perhaps I just felt like I needed to make something.

The idea for the piece is actually rather simple and I think the overall affect is very clear just from the opening 30 seconds of the piece with this nearly metronomic declaration of harmony again and again and again and again until time starts to disappear. I consider this piece part of my void series although - it’s probably the better outer edge of what that series can put together or what I was trying to investigate it. Check out page 18 of my dissertation (which I would love if you read in its entirety), but it’s pertinent to this conversation about the series and I think it enlightens a little bit of the trajectory of this piece.

There are a few patterns happening on top of each other in this piece - not only from a harmonic standpoint, but also from an orchestration standpoint with the relationships between the instruments in the quartet and how they kaleidoscope around each other.

There’s a sense of a descent here, but not a descent in certain sort of negative affectation like descending into hell or anything like that, but more like a light drifting down; perhaps something like leaves falling or clouds changing shape. The sound is intended to be rather light and harmonious as well; the declarations may be predictable rhythmically, but I think there’s a layer of unpredictability happening with each utterance: in the intersections of patterns, “key,” any sort of voice leading predictability and the other slight adjustments that I made outside of these patterns, just for continuity sake.

All that being said, I will say that the score looks like shit and honestly I’m mildly embarrassed about having it on my website, but it is what it is. Eventually, I plan on re-engraving the piece into something that makes more sense and is easier to read, easier to keep track of the notes, just clearer… but that’s a project for another time. Regardless of how shitty the score looks, the recording process itself is actually really good and really fun, getting a group together, folks I have worked with in the past in several other contexts and playing a piece. It’s actually rather simple and straightforward to put together, I’m not even sure they actually really rehearsed it or if we just did it live, but after hearing the sequence of chord upon chord upon chord upon, I ended up finding one of the chords that I quite enjoyed and it made a lot of sense just in the moment to put a massive fermata on it, although this is not reflected in the score (at the moment), you can clearly hear it in the recording, and it’s extremely hard to miss.