Seven Sides (String Quartet No. 1)
Robert Maggio, one of my professors from West Chester University, was fond of imposing limits on himself and his music, and it was a practice he encouraged in his students. “Tie one hand behind your back,” he would say, “and then be creative.” This is something I’ve come back to frequently, and something I’ve passed on to my students. While there is something to be learned from writing without any limitations, I’ve come to believe that there is a great deal more to be learned from discipline and boundaries. This is not only true in music and art, of course.
Seven Sides is this concept played out to a logical, albeit absurd, extreme. Each movement was composed as a first draft and written in a single sitting. (I will admit to some minor editorial tinkering in preparing this current edition.) The reason why is simple: I was about to graduate from college and I had already completed my senior recital, but I felt the need to write one more piece before commencement. I hadn’t yet achieved my goal of writing a string quartet, and that seemed like a gap worth filling. The piece was written haphazardly in less than a week, performed with minimal rehearsal, and dedicated, with respect and affection, to Dr. Maggio.
A note on the title: Among his many insights, Dr. Maggio provided a much needed in-road to the music of Anton Webern. Rather than approaching Webern’s music with the expectation that it will do what music usually does, he compared it to viewing an object, perhaps one suspended from the ceiling in a room. There is a Webern room, and when you listen to Webern, you go into the Webern room, and you look at the object. (I’ve since come to love the music of Webern, but my understanding of it has not necessarily changed; I’ve just come to have tremendous admiration for the Webern room, and the objects therein.) Seven Sides is not my attempt to replicate Webern, but to riff on the idea of a piece of music as a multi-sided object. Some sides of this particular object may be bold, absurd, delicate, dramatic, or funny; they may even appear unfinished. This particular object has seven sides.
One more thing: Seven Sides, to the best of my understanding, has yet to be recorded. If you do record it, please send a recording to [email protected].
Duration: 4 minutes
Seven Sides is this concept played out to a logical, albeit absurd, extreme. Each movement was composed as a first draft and written in a single sitting. (I will admit to some minor editorial tinkering in preparing this current edition.) The reason why is simple: I was about to graduate from college and I had already completed my senior recital, but I felt the need to write one more piece before commencement. I hadn’t yet achieved my goal of writing a string quartet, and that seemed like a gap worth filling. The piece was written haphazardly in less than a week, performed with minimal rehearsal, and dedicated, with respect and affection, to Dr. Maggio.
A note on the title: Among his many insights, Dr. Maggio provided a much needed in-road to the music of Anton Webern. Rather than approaching Webern’s music with the expectation that it will do what music usually does, he compared it to viewing an object, perhaps one suspended from the ceiling in a room. There is a Webern room, and when you listen to Webern, you go into the Webern room, and you look at the object. (I’ve since come to love the music of Webern, but my understanding of it has not necessarily changed; I’ve just come to have tremendous admiration for the Webern room, and the objects therein.) Seven Sides is not my attempt to replicate Webern, but to riff on the idea of a piece of music as a multi-sided object. Some sides of this particular object may be bold, absurd, delicate, dramatic, or funny; they may even appear unfinished. This particular object has seven sides.
One more thing: Seven Sides, to the best of my understanding, has yet to be recorded. If you do record it, please send a recording to [email protected].
Duration: 4 minutes
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