Meridians (2023) for String Quartet
For JACK Quartet, with deep admiration.
Program Note
The title of my piece, Meridians, is a reference to the notion of grids. In constructing this piece, I relied on two types of gridded schema: 1) looping rhythmic patterns and 2) the open strings of the instruments. Both of these “grids” are used in an attempt to bring justly-tuned sonorities to the realm of relatively fast (or otherwise rhythmically dense) music. I’ve conceived of each open string as a kind of metaphorical line of longitude which serves as a point of reference for the musicians as they traverse the landscape of extended just intonation. As such, each player is nearly always playing a double stop with one open string and one fingered pitch. The resultant music is, I hope, both rhythmically teeming and harmonically kaleidoscopic.