String Quartet No. 1 ‘Town’ (2017)
Written for string quartet, composed in 2017. Premiered and recorded by the Town Quartet:Mia Bella D’Augelli (violin), Corey Christopher Mike (violin), Jacob Hansen-Joseph (viola), and Lewis Patzner (cello).
I first saw the Town Quartet play in August of 2015 at the Omni Commons in Oakland. I had just moved to the bay, having finished my undergrad at Willamette University in 2014 and floated around for a bit, and they embodied the epitome of what I my post-college life to look like: freshly composed DIY classical music presented in a grungy, totally non-classical venue. I was enchanted by the Omni Commons and its bizarre ballroom, these young players playing heady, virtuosic music for an engrossed, (mostly) younger audience, and especially the compositions of Lewis Patzner and his short quartets.
After this initial exposure, the folks of Town Quartet and I would go on to collaborate on many projects, including them playing for services at St. Paul Lutheran, recording on my album Covenant of Grace, and this string quartet that I wrote specifically for them in 2017, which I dubbed ‘Town.’
The three main sonic inspirations for my String Quartet No. 1 are these: pop-punk, trap music, and J.S. Bach. Blink-182 and Weezer have been especially potent inspirations for me throughout my life, and I am always striving to translate their punchy, distorted, angst-ridden guitars to bowed string instruments.
Transcribing the musical ideas of Trap music has been a fancy of mine since college, which culminated in the opera I wrote for my thesis, Neon Mirror Festival. One of the most apparent characteristics in Trap music is the rapidly subdividing high-hat which is in a constant state of flux. In the first movement of this work, I gave the first violin the role of the high-hat, which oscillates between sixteenth note triplets and thirty-second notes. I fill out this emulation of the drum machine by giving the middle voices (violin 2 and viola) the role of the snare with their col legno hits on beats 2 and 4, and the cello that of the kick drum, solidly holding down beats 1 and 3.
J.S. Bach will always be one of my greatest musical loves, and the first and last movements are direct references to him. I spend a lot of time thinking about and playing the Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and very much imitated the C major and minor preludes in the first book in my first movement. His preludes are often comprised of a short melodic and rhythmic motif which undergoes drastic changes in harmony, repeating incessantly and building tension through harmonies which get further and further from the initial key center. Bach also often employed pedal points, or keeping the same bass note as the harmonies change above it, which is also how I begin the first movement. The fourth and final movement of the ‘Town’ string quartet is a fugue on the subject introduced in the first movement.