Orchestration

for string quartet

Duration

8 minutes

Commissioned by/Premiere

Ponte Musmeci was premiered on March 19, 2017 at the Broad Stage in Los Angeles, California by the Calder Quartet.

Commissioned by the Calder Quartet.

Score

Listen

Note

Ponte Musmeci draws its title from a visit to the Ponte Sul Basento (Bridge over the Basento River), a bridge in the southern Italian city of Potenza. It is often called the Ponte Musmeci, named after its designer, the engineer Sergio Musmeci. While visiting Potenza, I was struck by this beautiful and hulking modernist mass—with its curving lines and concrete structure—that stood out from so much older, historical, and ornamented architecture in Italy.

The work traces my own experience of walking through the substructure of the bridge, which features wavelike shapes that undulate slowly downward and outward. In my piece, the quartet very slowly expands from one of the highest notes on the violin to the lowest of the cello in a series of wavelike patterns—cycles that repeat and contract. Each member of the quartet plays different rhythms on top of one another; in the piece I was imagining how different speeds can represent the varying arches of the bridge. Finally, the musical material itself—sharp, repeated notes—draw inspiration from the material of concrete; something not often thought of as beautiful, yet an infinitely malleable material.

Ponte Musmeci is a reimagining of the first movement of my work for piano, The Arching Path. When given the chance to expand it from a piano piece to a quartet, I was excited to explore the natural microtonal intervals that string instruments can achieve—moving beyond the fixed semitones of the piano into the rich territory of quarter-tones and natural harmonics. The work opens with a rapid fire violin line, who remains in the highest stratum. This is contrasted with a grainy viola, a bell-like violin, and a cello whose role it is to move the piece forward. As the piece progresses, the roles switch, but throughout the work they maintain their individual characters.