Player Score-John Luther Adams' Untouched for String Quartet. Player score. Over the years my large ensemble works have sometimes included String Quartet. However I didn't write my first piece forString Quartet alone until I was fifty-nine. Now in my second String Quartet the fingers of the players still have yet to touch the fingerboard. This music contains no normal stopped tones. All the sounds areproduced either as natural harmonics or on open strings. The highest harmonic utilized is the 10th. Some of the harmonics may be more resonant when played as double harmonics. For example the 6th harmonic can beproduced by simultaneously touching the nodes for the 2nd and 3rd harmonics. Dynamics are free. But all the sounds in the air at any moment should be equally balanced. - John Luther Adams
SKU: HL.284555
UPC: 888680912901. 9x12 inches.
Composers note:I never imagined I would write a string quartet. Then I heard the JACK Quartet, and I understood how I might be able to make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places - a twenty-minute work composed entirely on natural harmonics and open strings.Over the next few years, two more quartets followed. The second quartet, untouched, is a further exploration of the aeolian sound world of the first. Then, in Canticles of the Sky, the musicians finally touch the fingerboards of their instruments.And now comes Everything That Rises.This fourth quartet is more expansive, both in time and in space. It grows out of Sila: The Breath of the World - a performance-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds.Everything That Rises traverses this same territory, but in a much more melodic way.Each musician is a soloist, playing throughout. They surround the audience. Time floats.Over the course of an hour, the lines spin out - always rising - in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward... until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.
