PROGRAM NOTE

This piece was composed for and premiered at the HighSCORE Festival in Pavia, Italy and later performed by the Calder Quartet in Davis, California. As my first work for string quartet, I wanted to seize the opportunity to experiment with the vast coloristic, textural, and expressive possibilities this historic instrumentation has to offer. As a structural framework for this goal, I decided to use the emerging and passing of a storm. For example, many of the sustained and glissandi (a technique of “sliding” from one note to the other) passages represent sunlight, and the col legno (the strings are hit with the wood of the bow) and pizzicati textures in the middle section often represent rain and water. However, it isn’t important to that the audience hears these literal elements. Instead, they were starting point to compose interesting sounds, contrasts, and to create an emotionally satisfying journey for the listener. (RS)​