Instumentation: String Quartet

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This string quartet, written in 2010, followed soon after my first of a year or so earlier. Whereas the first dealt with a modernist and realist aesthetic, the second explored a transcendental idealist perspective regarding development of both technology and the human nervous system.

The form is loosely based on ideas expounded by Timothy Leary in his book Exo-Psychology, where the development of human consciousness is presented from a materialist (evolutionary biological) perspective. A development from simple organisms to incorporeal mind is traced. Leary describes eight main phases (subdivided into 24 in total) where he presents a theory of the development of the human nervous system as the key to understanding the evolution of life.

Whereas modernist composers such as Elliott Carter and Ernst Krenek influenced the first quartet, the second integrated something of the manner of Giacinto Scelsi and Brian Ferneyhough.

Having recently become aware of the Urantia Book as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s and Jimi Hendrix’ interest in such, it remains to be seen as to whether a future, explicitly spiritual, expression in the form of a third quartet is redundant or not.

SB, Berlin 2025