Aqua

2011

Program Note

Harold Meltzer’s string quartet Aqua responds to Jeanne Gang’s swirling Chicago skyscraper, puffy balconies disappearing into dark watery windows. The music has a variety of extended techniques that suggest simulateously the regularity of steel grids and the foam of waves. In Newmusicbuff, Allan Cronin wrote that the effects “suggest movement in much the same way the building itself does. This is genius, the ability to mix all these string techniques into a coherent whole.”

Commissioned for the Avalon, Lydian, and Pacifica Quartets through the award of the 2008 Barlow Prize by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University

About Harold Meltzer

Harold Meltzer is inspired by a wide variety of stimuli, from architectural spaces to postmodern fairy tales and messages inscribed in fortune cookies. In Fanfare Magazine, Robert Carl commented that…

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