Alikeness

Alikeness is a suite of eight movements imagined and composed for a Sunday afternoon at Bing Concert Hall with the St. Lawrence String Quartet and Aiyun Huang – an unhurried occasion with magnificent musicians and lush acoustics. The invitation to contribute in this way to the 25th-anniversary celebration of the St. Lawrence String Quartet was a joy, an honor, and a tempting challenge. One of the characteristics of percussion and string quartet is their inherent dissimilarity. Percussion became a solo instrument only in the 20th century as the aesthetic trends promoted an appreciation for complex sound colors and noise. On the other hand, the idiomatic vocabulary of the string quartet was formed almost two centuries earlier by Joseph Haydn, and since then the form continuously thrived on pitch, harmony, and purity of tone. The contrast appeared even stronger in my mind as the performers of this concert are some of the world’s most sophisticated proponents of these qualities. Hybridism is something I have been dealing with in most of my work as it usually mixes media, so the attempt to marry the seemingly incompatible musical pair was both a welcome continuation and an irresistible new challenge.

My approach to the disparity was inspired by Jazz, a series of cutouts by Henri Matisse. This masterpiece from late in the artist’s life builds on careful arrangement of simple shapes cut out from single colored sheets of gouache painted paper. The power of line and color contrast has been perfectly harnessed. Similarly, I decided to expose contrasting edges and differences between strings and percussion. At first, I imagined never letting the two play a single note together. Everything was to be rhythmically offset. Later, as the piece progressed, that literal approach was expanded by other configurations that allowed dynamic hiding and revealing of one sound world from behind the other.

The title Alikeness refers to two conceptual notions as well. The first is an interest in portraiture—in this case, my fascination with the almost disturbing resemblance of people’s eyes in Rembrandt’s work. Their depth and wise expression seem to transcend pictorial realism. Each of my movements is based on a character but despite external differences of instrumentation and pace, all are shown with a certain calm nostalgia. None of the characters or movements is named to avoid distracting listeners from gazing directly into music’s eye. All that is given are numbers representing their order of appearance. To reveal another important, recent inspiration, I should say that the constancy may resemble that of the masks in Noh drama, which change under the stage lights with the slightest movement of the actors.

Second, I have a great interest in the ostensibly familiar. Seeing things with a fresh and simple mind as if for the first time is of great value to me. To fully internalize that feeling and then share it with the audience, I tend to redance, repaint or, remusic the world. I have done intermedia “remixes” of Chopin, Webern, Scarlatti and Mondrian, as well as poetic reinventions of airports, typewriters or fruit. I think of these as my little battles of affirmation against entropy.

Finally, I wish to express great gratitude to the St. Lawrence String Quartet musicians and Aiyun Huang for their contribution to the creation of the piece. The warmth of the word like hiding within the title feels most appropriate as a permanent testimony.