String Quartet #1
「採譜」'Saifu'

Date of composition: October 2016
Instrumentation: violin I, violin II, viola, cello
Duration: 22'
 

I first came upon the idea for this quartet during my self study of Japanese (a hobby I took up in 2015). The word ‘saifu’ (not to be confused with the more common homophone for ‘wallet’「財布」), is made up out of the characters for ‘to take/pluck/gather’ and ‘music paper’, giving it the nuance of "plucking notes and gathering them onto music paper". I was so enamoured with this word that a concept started forming immediately.

This also reminded me of a conversation I had had at that time with my composition teacher, where we discussed the different approaches to composing. In this day and age, composing has been made a lot easier thanks to notation programs such as Finale and Sibelius. However, writing with only a piano, pencil and paper at your disposal creates an entirely different atmosphere and way of thinking. It requires you to think much harder before writing something down, whereas with software, it’s easy to fall into the traps of copy-pasting and trial and error methods.

This work is, thus, the writing process of a composer put into sound. Each movement describes a phase in that process:
 

1. “Searching”, looking for a basis, a simple melodic idea that continuously expands, threads that slowly weave themselves into a rich tapestry of sound.

2. “Playing”, the experimenting phase, playing with the different ideas and motives that manifest themselves at the start of the process. 

3. “Stagnating”, coming to a standstill, writer’s block, frustration…

4. “Finding”, those who keep searching will find it in the end. The tensions and frustrations from before resolve and are let loose into a lively finale.

  The finale is featured on the CD Fingerprints #4.

Recording of the final movement by the Desguin quartet.

Live recording of the final movement by the Desguin quartet.