Ryan Chase

In 2014, I was invited to write a string quartet for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s Young Composers Project. I was a little uneasy: something about this tried-and-true collection of instruments still didn’t make sense to me. I listened for answers by putting the Emerson Quartet’s recordings of Bartók and late Beethoven on my stereo while realizing them at the piano. I marveled at how precisely these players were able to tune vertical sonorities, and how limited the false fifths of the piano sounded by comparison. Tighter textures in the middle register seemed to better align with the piano’s equal temperament, so I started sketching four movements that each began with the players in this tessitura.

That summer, I was working with a few groups at Sonart Studio in Woodstock. Built by Ken Lovelett, this recording studio also houses his collection of invented instruments. Recording with folk artists, arranging strings for another project, and improvising on Ken’s unique, alternately tuned percussion instruments, I was feeling the pulls of three very different musical worlds: the repertoire of my recently completed doctoral exams (from Guilliaume de Machaut to Crumb), the book of “songs most requested of cover bands,” and the music of Cage, Harrison, Johnston, and Partch. The first three drafts would become movements in a longer quartet, songs the monsters sang. The last draft would become this movement. It was a bit treacly compared to how the others turned out, so I set it aside from the rest to make finishing touches. The first three started with the quartet on different unisons to see if more “quartet-compatible” sonorities would arise more naturally, but this one began with a chord. A good old, tried-and-true major triad in closed, root position. Doubled root and everything. Putting it on the page, I recalled an offhand comment from an early lesson with Keith most vividly, “If you want to write tonal music, it better be good.”

At the time I didn’t particularly care about qualitative judgements. Despite the abundance of musical work, there was a lot of water to carry at the time. In search of stability, I went back to my roots and fundamentals. I wrote a jazz ballad that started off as more of a post-rock ballad. But as a lark, I imagined comping through the chart as if Bach was having a go at the thing on a half-broken harmonium during a late-night Thursday set. There is a blooming into a world adjacent to modal jazz followed by a neo-Romantic wail, and finally a half-whispered, half-stuttered coda.