Brick : Mortar Miniatures
string quartet
(2015)

Duration: 10 minutes

Premiered October 2019
Spektral Quartet
Chicago IL

Composer’s Note

Brick :  Mortar is a set of seven miniatures written for string quartet. The material comes from a much longer quartet of the same title, though upon completing that work, it became clear that not all of the music was as successful as I had intended it to be. (This is normal; it meant I was evolving and learning as a composer, and so, after nearly a year of work on the full-length string quartet, the decisions I had made when I first started it were not the ones I could stand by a year “wiser.”) This set of small pieces, roughly one fifth the length of the old work, stands as a much more focused version of its parent quartet.

Each miniature explores a different action word, revealed to the listener in the form of movement titles; some titles served as inspiration for music not yet composed and others arose from the character of the music that had just been written. The pitch material is based on various rotations and transformations of a half step and a tritone, though those intervallic relationships are not intended to be consistently audible throughout the piece. Each movement works in succession to hold together the larger structure of the work as a whole. While the moments can stand on their own as isolated, individual pieces, they also serve as the connective tissue that results in one, overarching composition.