Renaissance String Quartet - Love & Levity - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

These two quartets were written in the summer of 2021. There was a pandemic going on, and I spent most of the summer in my apartment, reading books and feeling the momentum of life melting away in the heat.Early that summer, I read Haruki Murakami's first novel, InchHear the Wind Sing,Inch and in the introduction he tells an anecdote from a baseball game InchIn the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba's first pitch into the left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me and in that instant, for no reason and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me I think I can write a novel.InchThis story had an effect on me similar to the crack of the bat, as I'd never written concert music but had always wanted to.My only idea of how to start composing was to improvise at the piano. There are parts of the piano quartet that are direct transcriptions of these sessions, such as the cadenza-like development section of the first movement. But even the most structured-sounding passages began as improvisations before being arranged into an almost naively typical sonata structure. The piano quartet, while clearly an InchearlyInch piece, introduced me to my own language, and got me addicted to composing.I started writing Love and Levity, my first string quartet, immediately after finishing the piano quartet. The Renaissance Quartet wasn't even really a thing yet, but I knew who I was writing it for. I consider the piece to be, at it's core, Beethovenian in it's thematic and structural tautness, but even more so in it's motion towards excess-staying on an idea for too long, playing something too fast or too slow, too quiet or too loud. The title came from this anachronistic romanticism, this desire to talk about big feelings, but always with a bit of humor, alw