music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Quartet No.4: Pulse 2016 string quartet duration 16' first performance: Nicole Parks, Natalie Calma: violins, Sam Kelder: viola, Steve Marrotto: cello Original Gravity / Lamplighter Brewing Company, Cambridge MA / February 7, 2017 SCORE PROGRAM NOTE This quartet was to have been a bright and playful addition to an evening of my string works presented by Original Gravity at the Lamplighter Brewing Co. in Cambridge, Mass. I had the whole work planned out and was arriving at the coda; a speedier recapitulation of the ever-circling material presented so-far, inckuding more time sitting with a dark, ambiguous, unresolved chord that had snuck into the work between sections. Then the news came of 49 people terrorized and murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The predictable outcry, the selfish stupidity of the murderer, the quick move to protect the vast money-making industry that firearms remains, the sanctimonious and prurient news coverage, and so on. So, instead of my light and speedy coda the work ends with that dark chord played forty-nine times in succession. This might seem like a melodramatic response, but it was either do this little thing or abandon the piece. I hope hearing this ending makes us all pause again and reclaim some of the will for change that bubbles up around these repeated atrocities but that, speaking for myself anyway, so easily falls away as daily life once again takes over.