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String Quartet #3 : 'Fiddlin'

String Quartet #3 was commissioned by a consortium of Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and NOVA Chamber Music Series, and premièred by the Fry Street Quartet on an AFCM evening series concert in 2013 in Tucson, Arizona (USA). The score was published in 2013 by Marks Music (New York, NY).

The main research challenge for this quartet was to weave ‘fiddling’ patterns from North American ‘Bluegrass’, as well as patterns from Balkan and Turkish folk music, into a coherent tapestry structured by more formal elements of a personal, ‘abstract’ contemporary musical discourse. With its stream-of- consciousness, multi-movement structure, the work contextualises vernacular, traditional string figures and ‘riffs’ within a more abstract, at times strikingly dissonant sound world, presenting fiddling elements in some moments as an immediate, direct presence occupying the entire sound space, while at other times juxtaposing them as fragments of pastoral innocence set within a web of post-modern abstraction and illusion or memory, at one or several steps removed from their respective traditions.

A secondary compelling research question was how to create a coherent, overarching structure that would transcend an ostensibly fragmented surface: Eleven distinct movements, within some twenty-two minutes lend the work its unique structure. But the use of a ‘hidden’ whole-step figure which appears within nearly every important idea, whether ascending or descending, as well as several themes which return in transformed ways, allow a sense of continuity to be felt despite rapid surface changes in texture and tempi.

In summary, this work explores what meaning ‘tradition’ and ‘vernacular’ elements might still carry in a post-tradition, post-classical music, multi-cultural milieu, mirroring the transformation of consciousness from age-old truths to individuated ones—cogent reasons for creating new work that addresses such paradoxes in a musical realm.