String Quartet - "Birds"

Here is my old string quartet (Fall 2005).

From the program: "I like to imagine that music exists whether we write it or not. Like radio waves, it fills the air always, but we do not have the equipment to hear. Writing is the way we listen. In doing the paperwork, we open ourselves to flashes of intuition about how it goes, and slowly wrestle it out into the open. I want my music to describe that drama. From a cloud of bird cries a song is pulled – at first slowly, with great effort, one note drawn out at a time. From more struggle comes more clarity, and then the music is made incarnate and set free. It has a life of its own: it moves of out of its own momentum, developing out of its own needs and tendencies, its underlying structure overgrown with organic details. After it lives out its destiny, it is pulled from us, disappearing back into the air."