Awaking Embrace

Awaking Embrace is a programmatic piece for string quartet with an amplified violin soloist. The piece was conceived as a response to sonata form, with a “precapitulation” serving as a prologue to the standard formal design. The realization of this yields a distinctly more organic and uninhibited sense of musical direction than the more conventional and familiar design of sonata form does for much of the piece. Harmonically, the piece is very grounded in Romantic tonality, though several of the rapid shifts between tonal centers creates moments of tension and release which often give the feeling of the music falling into just the right place. The final and most striking of these shifts occurs in the coda as the soloist (followed by the accompanying quartet) land on G half-flat major, slowly modulating out by gradually raising the pitch in relation to the cents difference between equally tempered intervals and the upper partials of the harmonic series. Awaking Embrace depicts the feeling of waking up, followed by the warm and blissful sensation of inactivity as one’s consciousness gains clarity. To that end, the amplification of the solo violinist exists not to simply increase the volume or presence of the soloist but to instead allow for the delicate, whisper-like pianissimo register to be heard against the other unamplified strings. This creates the sense of both distance and intimacy, while the separation of timbre gives a new perspective to an instrumentation that would otherwise be defined by a very commonplace sound.

Performance Time: 9’00”