"Quaerendo Invenietis," the first movement from Unending Rose (2017-2019) for string quartet
이동렬, 현악 사중주를 위한 "무한의 장미" 중 제 1악장, 쥬피터 사중주단
The Jupiter Quartet
Nelson Lee, violin 1
Megan Freivogel McDonough, violin 2
Liz Freivogel, viola
Daniel McDonough, violoncello
Illinois Modern Ensemble Concert
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Studio Theatre
November 28, 2018
Graham Duncan, sound engineer
Unending Rose (2017-2019)
1. Quaerendo Invenietis
2. The Thorn of the Sung Rose
3-1. Ricercar
3-2. Cavatina: "that the Lord will show to my dead eyes"
3-3. Coda: "Masks, Agonies, Resurrections"
Program notes
Unending Rose is my modest prayer, gift and homage à Saint Mary, my own version of the Holy Rosary: a musical rose, made up with pure, pristine, and unprecedented sounds. For this I devised a program which explores unknown consonance scales and harmonies from different tuning systems. Here the word ‘consonance’ hews closer to its original meaning in counterpoint -the harmonious ratios between voices (punctus contra punctum), but expanded and developed with the help of technology. To create an artwork with this otherworldly quality, for the first movement, “Quaerendo Invenietis,” I imagined a parallel world in which music is unlike our Western art music (à la Ligeti’s imaginary childhood world, Kylwiria), and established a short musicological history of an epic age: the birth of scale, melody, harmony, and musical drama. The second movement, “The Thorn of the Sung Rose”(from To the Nightingale), is a poetic musical sculpture of concise shapes, in which the musical materials are more celestial (even higher ratios between 16 to 32) and pure (deviation values within 3 cents, 3/100 of a half step from pure ratios), since the thorn denotes not only the agony of crucifixion, but also a pathway towards love and infinity. (e.g. the symbolism of Nigredo, or the love‐death theme of the Nightingale in the Philomela myth, Persian fairytale, and Oscar Wilde's short story) The third movement, “3-1. Ricercar,” “3-2. Cavatina: that the Lord will show to my dead eyes,” and “3-3. Coda: Masks, Agonies, Resurrections” are completed in November 2019. The title is from Borges’s poem cycle, The Unending Rose, which gave me ceaseless inspiration. The entire piece runs about 40 minutes.
The first movement, “Quaerendo Invenietis” is commissioned to be premiered by the JUPITER STRING QUARTET in November 2018.
The second movement, “The thorn of the sung rose” was premiered by the MIVOS quartet at June in Buffalo Summer Festival in June 2019.
The entire work, which runs about 40 minutes of duration, will be performed by the Kairos Quartett in Berlin in May 2020.