Treatises for an Unrecovered Past for string quartet
(2013/rev. 2017)
I have no idea if this string quartet will survive. I’ve told myself that this music is for now; it’s not confessional, it’s not representational, but it is a glimpse into the parts of my life that are most private. My acknowledgement of my mortality plays strange games inside this private space – I am here now, but I will be gone someday, and with the passage of time (it won’t be all that long now…), I will be forgotten altogether. All the things I will have done while alive, like writing this music, will be lost. It happens to everyone; no one is spared. What if, by some freak stroke of luck, some of my music, only bits and pieces here and there, did survive into a future when no one knew much of anything about me? What if those future discoverers tried to reassemble those found fragments, producing a piece and a performance of the music with the best available scholarship regarding performance practice? An assembly of a memory that never happened. A recording of the work is available on CD with the Lydian Quartet on Albany Records.
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