resonance

for piano, double string quartet, and contrabass (2022)
Duration: 50’

I’ve been thinking a lot about resonance recently.

Resonance of sound, of course. How the notes of a piano accumulate when you leave the sustain pedal down, blending into a diffuse haze of harmony like faded memories of the music that came before.

But also, the resonance of moments, of people. How echoes of past events and lives can be felt in the present. How our present memories both sustain and obscure this past: preserving it, yet rendering it indistinct, somehow alien.

This piece emerged out of these musings. Throughout, the piano articulates single notes, which the strings sustain, as if preserving a memory. But as these memories gradually overlap, the resulting sound becomes ever more nebulous. The piece is structured in ten sections, each of which is an elaboration on (echo of?) the previous. Thus, past moments continually resonate throughout the piece’s present.

I want to get across the strange profundity of this situation: we cannot help but live in the resonances of a past far beyond our control, beyond even our imagining. In fact, this may be all our lives are: a blur of past moments, echoing across eons.