Instrumentation: STRING QUARTET
First Performance: JACK Quartet, 92nd Street Y, New York, NY. Nov. 10, 2024.
Commissioned by JACK Quartet with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, 92nd Street Y, and Wigmore Hall. To Austin, Chris, John, and Jay.
Duration: 20 minutes
I. Stretto House (after Steven Holl/Béla Bartók)
II. 830 Fireplace Road (after John Yau/Jackson Pollock)
III. Meditation on Motion (after Dean Rader/Cy Twombly)
IV. Journey to Mount Tamalpais (after Etel Adnan)
Twice Removed is a series of double-reflections, four musical responses to artworks that are themselves responses to other pieces. The practice of ekphrasis, or describing/evoking another work of art through a different medium, undergoes a further transformation in each of these movements. Sometimes a trace of the original remains through conscious or even subconscious allusions, whereas others have been filtered into something very different. How much of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the inspiration behind architect Steven Holl’s 1991 Stretto House in Dallas, is carried over into this new reflection? The stretto device in music (a contrapuntal technique of close imitative entrances) finds its way into the “aqueous space” of Holl’s design and the overlapping curvilineal metal overhead, contrasting with orthogonal blocks that divide each section. In “830 Fireplace Road,” John Yau – long known for donning the twin hats of poet and art critic – riffs on and reorders a sentence of Jackson Pollock: "When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” The fourteen lines form a set of variations, an unconventional take on the sonnet, where words and meaning collapse into pure rhythm and sound. Reaching back to the source, Pollock’s drip technique has some bearing on the timbres of the instruments here. A continuous line that traces itself into white circles on a gray canvas forms the unforgettable image of Cy Twombly’s "Cold Stream." And Dean Rader, in his volume of ekphrastic Twombly-inspired poems Before the Borderless, writes in “Meditation on Motion”: "The line like the river does not know to stop/ neither does my wonder/ I would like these lines to be drawn on my skin/ I would like to feel these lines beneath my skin...” Finally, the last movement is quite different in mood and source. It reflects on moments, both verbal and visual, from Etel Adnan’s Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), a longform meditation on and paean to the highest peak in the Marin Hills, which for Adnan represented a kind of transcendental beauty that she tried to capture in writing, drawing, and painting over several decades. In it, she writes, “I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept?… Tamalpais has an autonomy of being. So does a drawing of it. But they are mysteriously related.” So too is a piece of music that engages with both of them.
Twice Removed was commissioned by JACK Quartet with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, 92nd Street Y, and Wigmore Hall. It is dedicated to the musicians of JACK with immense gratitude and in celebration of the group’s 20th anniversary.
Anthony Cheung
