The composer writes: “I’ve always been a walker. For much of my life I walked the mountains and tundra of Alaska. More recently it’s been the Mexican desert, the altiplano, quebradas, and mountain ridges of Chile, and the hills and canyons of Montana. Making my way across these landscapes . . . I began to imagine music coming directly out of the contours of the land.
“I began work on my fifth string quartet, Lines Made by Walking (commissioned by Tippet Rise Art Center, 2019) by composing three expansive harmonic fields made up of tempo canons with five, six, and seven independent layers. Once I’d composed these fields, I traced pathways across them. As I did this, each instrument of the quartet acquired a unique profile, transforming the strict imitative counterpoint of the tempo canons into intricately varied textures.”
The composer writes about untouched: “I stood on the tundra, holding a small Aeolian harp on top of my head, dancing with the wind, turning like a weathervane. Music seemed to flow out of the sky—across the strings, down through my body, and into the earth. From that beginning, I’ve discovered a broad harmonic and melodic palette derived from superimposing the harmonic series on itself at different intervals.
“I composed my first piece for string quartet, The Wind in High Places (2011), when I was fifty-eight. As I wrote it, I imagined the quartet as a single sixteen-string Aeolian harp, with the music’s rising and falling lines and gusting arpeggios coming entirely from natural harmonics and open strings. My second string quartet, untouched (2016), was a further exploration of this sound world, with the fingers of the musicians still not touching their fingerboards.”
Performed by the incredible, illustrious JACK Quartet.
