Metasomatic: Coalescences (2019) for string quartet

Metasomatic: Coalescences was premiered on May 2, 2019 by the Mivos Quartet during a brief residency at Northwestern University, where they premiered works by graduate composers, including Yi-Ting Lu, Noah Jenkins, Luis Fernando Amaya, Andrew Maxbauer, and myself.

This piece is the continuation of harmonic and multiphonic trills that I explored in Metasomatic: Bifurcations for cello solo. The motoric nature of the trill in the left hand and the instability of high partials was an interesting dichotomy that yields a rich landscape of harmonies. The first three pieces in this series are all for solo instrument, and in each one, I investigate the concept of a trill more generally as an alternation between two states, both abstractly and expressively: up and down, high and low, quiet and loud, stasis and activity, on and off, etc. Coalescences is the first for ensemble, which allows for the introduction of a new set of dualities, but the one I became most interested in was togetherness versus separation, and this is what shaped the majority of my formal decisions.