Music of Nights Without Moon or Pearl is a 1998 work for string quartet, contrabass, two pianos, and electronic keyboard. The strings in this piece play pizzicato throughout—with their notes sometimes arriving one at a time, disconnected from one another, and sometimes arriving in flurries. An arch-form work that unfolds slowly and insistently, at its point of greatest activity, the texture of Music of Nights . . . might be likened to the sound of rainfall on a roof—delicate, resonate, active, continuously changing while, in some sense, seeming to remain the same.
Invisible "Seeds" for James Tenney is a 1998 work scored for the same forces as Music of Nights It too is an arch-form work, but unlike its aforementioned sister piece, the strings always play arco. It begins with somewhat slowly moving sustained tones, gradually picks up its pace and intensity until it reaches its climax, and then it slows back down to a state that is somewhat akin to its beginning.
Entrances is a work for four pianos—all four parts stunningly played by David Rosenboom, who also realized the specific construction of the version of this somewhat open-form piece that is heard here. Starting with intermittent bursts of notes, it builds to an extraordinarily dense barrage of sound. |