Consilience

Program note

CONSILIENCE was written in late 1999 for the violinist Silke Meyer-Eggen and the violist Kate Read, with video by Tadasu Takamine. I had just finished reading E. O. Wilson's Consilience, and the book's preoccupation with convergence shaped the piece: the melody is constantly distributed between the two players, demanding a particular kind of listening — to oneself, to each other, to the overall result. Canons at the fifth recur throughout, a structure that sits naturally between two instruments tuned a fifth apart.

The work grows from a single D passed between violin and viola. Neighboring tones gradually accumulate, opening onto a series of episodes — by turns dance-like, tender, violent — that remain harmonically static and non-developmental beneath their surface activity.

The first half subsides into a coda that quietly echoes the opening. The second half then breaks loose — ♩. = 88 accelerating to ♩ = 168 — through an antiphonal race, a raucous dance, and whirlwinds that coalesce into majestic chords, slowly resolving into a rough retrograde of the opening — a wide ambitus contracting into a narrow register punctuated by long silences.

Also available as transcriptions for saxophone quartet and string quartet.

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