Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer

2024 | 22 min

Contact for score and parts.

Elements of polytonality…used to good effect… each voice, fragmenting melodic cells and passing them around the quartet with each player playing in imitation….a breath of fresh air. — The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Program Note

As an English major first starting to compose in my early 20s, I couldn’t quite understand why anyone would want to set words to music and ruin a perfectly good poem. Later working with opera composer Dominick Argento, he instilled in me an understanding that setting words is less about the words themselves and more about one’s point of view the experience those words evoke. Again, strangely considering how much vocal music I’ve written, I prefer abstract music without words generally. To me words make the musical experience less direct. At the same time there is something about composing vocal music that helps a composer create abstract materials and dramatic structures with real, expressive, and dramatic clarity.

Over the past 15 years or so I started wondering what would happen if I reconsidered some of my vocal music from an abstract perspective. This new string quartet is one of those reworkings. Three of the movements are based on songs from my Donald Hall song cycle Letting Go written in 2017: I. Fall, a reworking of The Wish (a poem written about past trauma and imagined letting go); II. Winter, a reworking of The Child (about unknowing); IV. Summer, a reworking of White Apples (about the present moving forward and a letting go in earnest). In between Winter and Summer is III. Spring. Spring was written in 2011, several years before the other three movements, as a musical portrait of a person’s life. The four movements are put together to form an expressive arc of sorts, moving from an uncertain darkness to a more reflective sense of possibility.

—Howard Frazin

Listen

The two outside movements of the quartet are based on two songs from “Letting Go,” a song cycle setting of six poems by Donald Hall. These songs are “The Wish” (1. Fall) and “White Apples” (4. Summer).