Apertures (2017) for saxophone quartet
In early 2017, I started painting again, after not having done it for several years. I learned the basics of how to paint a portrait, which consists of working in layers, blocking on the most general shapes and values and progressively adding in more and more detail. This approach excited me tremendously when I returned to music, and Apertures for saxophone quartet was the first piece that reflected this compositional strategy.
In order to build the foundation, I chose to reduce the materials to two simple categories: lines and multiphonics. I made copies of crude visual representations of these two sound types and improvised a formal sketch on a scroll of paper that stretched across my living room and within two hours, I felt I had determined the “background.” I mapped a pitch structure onto the sketch, added measure lines, determined dynamics arcs, and finally, created a catalogue of extremely high, intersecting squiggly textures that were small-scale distortions and permutations of the global pitch structure, which I then distributed throughout the ensemble.
I was lucky to work in close collaboration with ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, to whom the piece is dedicated, throughout the entirety of the process on a weekly basis, so the composing of the piece really felt similar to painting, in that each week, I progressively added more and more detail and the quartet gave me constant feedback that helped push the limits of what I initially thought were possible. ~Nois premiered the piece on May 25, 2017, at Northwestern University. It is featured on their debut album alongside works by Marcos Balter, Niki Harlafti, Craig Davis Pinson, David Reminick, and Hans Thomalla.