Quartet Ablaze, for clarinet, violin, cello, piano

8:00

Quartet Ablaze has two structural features in common with my experience of Facebook, the social networking site: the sense that a posting is rarely static, because over time it becomes embellished by comments of increasingly greater separation from the original; and the notion that seemingly unrelated steps on a Facebook “path” are, in fact, related by the intervening series of clicks, however tangential and numerous, that connect them. In Quartet Ablaze, there is a significant number of musical themes or characters linked into larger musical units. These themes return multiple times, but always in a new guise—a new order of connection (thus reconfiguring the unit of which they are a part), more embellished, re-orchestrated, and so forth. Although Quartet Ablaze is like Facebook in interesting ways, it is not, in fact, inspired by it--they have analogous features. But the title was inspired by a friend’s Facebook status: imagine your first name followed by Ablaze, as in Zae Ablaze, or Astrid Ablaze. It suggests that you are inspired, on fire, motivated, on the move. Insert Quartet in that space, for obvious reasons, and you have the title. The metaphorical fire/energy/direction builds, roars, dies down, smolders, crackles again.