Metasomatic: Bifurcations (2018-19) for cello
Metasomatic: Bifurcations was a turning point for me as a composer. For years, I had been somewhat disconnected from the cello as a medium for composing, partly because I had grown tired of hearing so many clichés in new music, which I personally perpetuated, and which didn’t sit well with me as a cellist—I stopped playing for years because of this, and that influenced my composing in ways which I didn’t anticipate. After a series of concerts where I felt alienated from pieces I had written without any acoustic reference, I felt compelled to change my approach and the cello was the most welcoming place to start. I began exploring harmonics and multiphonics, trying to understand the slight changes and gradations of color that emerge with subtle nuances of the bow pressure, contact point, left-hand finger pressure, vibrato, trills, and so forth—even the room has a particular response to these nuances. Since I was interested primarily in natural harmonics, I felt it was important to explore various scordaturas to escape from the 5th-related harmonics present on stringed instruments. The important thing is that my ears were influencing my composing in a much more dynamic way, and for the first time, I really felt emotionally connected to the work on a deep level.
“Meta-” for me can be defined as both transcendental, as in “metaphysical,” and "change, as in “metamorphosis,” while “-somatic” refers to the body. The title was born out of a desire to be encapsulate dynamic musical shapes without limiting an interpretation explicitly to what is literally happening in the piece. In the piece, I chose to use trills as the primary source of all musical exploration. A trill is, simply put, the alternation between two states. I searched for various ways to use that concept, from the surface of the music to the deepest structural level. Counterpoint, dynamics, register, timbre, form—they all respond to the binary nature of the trill, alternating from one end of the spectrum to the other in any given parameter throughout the piece.
Metasomatic: Apparitions (2018-19) for cello
Metasomatic: Apparitions was a continuation of these explorations, but I reversed the position of the trill from the left hand to the right hand, which had a dramatic impact on the nature of the piece. While in the first piece, the right hand was frequently static in terms of tone production and the action happened primarily in the left hand, the opposite is true in Metasomatic II. The bow becomes much more influential in what harmonics or multiphonics are going to be audible at any given time. While the formal shape of the piece is very similar to the first piece, the focal points are quite different. I became fascinated by how unpredictable the bow can be when searching for partials. For example, in the second half of the piece, during a long loop section, I encourage as many harmonics and multiphonics to emerge as I can find. As I repetitively glide a fixed interval from one point to another, quickly alternating between two strings, I slowly inch the bow towards the bridge over a long period of time, until eventually, a constellation of high partials float in the atmosphere over a recognizable pattern, creating a real acoustic polyphony.
Throughout the piece, I was also fascinated by the impression of tonality that resulted in the chosen tuning (B-G-C#-A), where the lower two strings create an impression of B-minor/G-major and the upper two strings evoke C#-minor/A-major. Because I was invoking tonality without using actual functional harmonies, or using modalities in other words, the choice of pitches became much more reduced. Once again, I had to trust my ears as my guide. This isn’t to say that the piece is tonal or even modal, but that the tuning, resulting overtones, and choice of chords creates the illusion of familiar harmonic progressions.