Nebulaic Murmurs op. 1

Nebulaic Murmurs, for viola quartet, was written for the 45th International Viola Congress and recalls allusions to Wagner’s Waldesrauschen(Forest Murmurs) from act II of Siegfried. Here, the thematic program romanticizes the increasingly abandoned study of String Theory that promulgated scientific research toward the end of the last century.

As a product of Neo-romanticism, the music is an illustrative attempt at sonically portraying the ‘sub-atomic quarks… stately waltz of orbiting binary stars… the primordial fireball of the Big Bang [and] the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies’ that Brian Greene describes in the introduction to his ‘The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory’… and while the description set the tone for the formal narrative by which the piece was shaped, the inspiration came from a continuously evolving infatuation with the culture that surrounded Carl Sagan’s wonderfully orated book and television series, The Cosmos.

Structurally, the work is teleological in it’s introduction of themes and their developments, fugetta like passages lead to contrasting lyrical sections with a volatile development that presents a series of internal dance forms before the work implodes and exits the way it entered; a cosmic drifting out and away. It rarely if ever disengages from a strict contrapuntal writing that intertwines the homogenous registers and allows for close proximity and seamless expansion of texture.

Harmonically, the vocabulary is very much at home with the extended tonalities that have come synonymous with Neo-romantic works, and my ear in retrospect hears a veiled influence to Shostakovich and Bernard Herrmann in the distorted waltz.

While I would return to this type of triadic tonality often in my work, op. 1, nonetheless, shows an early obsession to transcend the confinement of tonal thinking without abandoning or rendering it something ‘other’; a process that would begin to take shape in op. 2.