de rerum natura I “el leñador” (2019) for amplified string quartet + video
10’30”
Click here for perusal score
composed for Spektral Quartet — performed at Taproot New Music Festival, January 31, 2020
PROGRAM NOTE: “But it always happens that we hear the sound of the thunder some time after we perceive it lighten, because objects, which affect the hearing, always come more slowly to the ears, than those, which affect the sight, arrive at the eye. This you may easily understand from the following instance. If you observe a man at a distance cutting down the trunk of a tree with an axe, you will see the stroke itself before the noise of the stroke makes any sound in the air.” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura e. vi. 160-184 (translation by John Selby Watson)
The video for this work is an assemblage of public domain science and art film clips, manipulated with Jitter for Max. The music is designed to react to onscreen events, but almost always after these events have occurred. No click track is used, so the interaction is deliberately intended to be volatile and change from performance to performance. I loosely used dactylic hexameter (the poetic meter of Lucretius’ epic De Rerum Natura) as a guide for timing the video editing and, therefore, the accompanying music. Much of the musical material in this piece was built from spectral analyses of speech which I transcribed for string quartet. — D.G.
