Contact - String Quartet

​“You're an interesting species (...) capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

This quote from Carl Sagan’s 1985 hard-science fiction novel, Contact, summarizes a point Sagan had
repeatedly tried to share with the world throughout his lifetime and illustrious career. His focus on unity, and
the acceptance of scientific unknowns is never made clearer than in the context of this expansive and beloved
novel. Vast ideologies and human beliefs are warped around a story of first contact with an alien species in an
endless spiraling of poignant interconnections and radio wave communications across the stars. Much like
Mahler’s famous quote of the symphonic form needing to contain “the entire world,” Sagan’s novel spins out
a riveting picture of an entire world, and then some.

Having begun work on this quartet in 2015, I spent almost a decade tinkering with the idea of finding a way
to express a similarly vast picture through sound. My attempts followed me through several stages of my
evolution as a composer and demanded an immense body of quotations. You will hear everything from the
first televised radio communication that was strong enough to escape our solar system (the bone-chilling opening
announcement of the 1936 German Summer Olympic Games) to the warmth of Kennedy’s famous speech,
“We Choose to Go to the Moon.” You will hear recordings of Gandhi’s spiritual views, and those of the early
black-American preacher Calvin P. Dixon. A recording of the Flonzaley String Quartet made a century ago of
Anton Rubinstein’s Music of the Spheres will play out in a stream of fixed-media alongside the intimate sound
world of the live string quartet. All these quotations build a collage of seemingly endless unknowns trailing
into space like the decimals of an irrational number. The music I have designed to surround these quotations
explores everything from a double-retrogradable fugue to the microtonal Avant Garde. It searches through
blaringly cinematic tonality, as well as binary serialism. The work ends with an accompanied reading of H. P.
Lovecraft’s poem, Harbour Whistles (recorded by Natasha Nelson). The last two lines of which read as follows,

“And always in that chorus, faintly blent,
We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent.”