Flux and Fire (2006)
for string quartet
My quartet, Flux and Fire, takes its title from a fragment of Heraclitus in Brooks Haxton’s luminous translation: Fire in its ways of changing/is a sea transfigured/between forks of lightning/and the solid earth. Heraclitus (sixth century, BC) was prescient in his understanding of energy (fire) as the essence of matter, and that all things are in a state of flux.
I have always been interested in the process of transformation in music, and I have frequently found inspiration for my instrumental music in literature. While writing this piece I began listening to Paul Rusesabagina’s extraordinary account of his personal experience during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (An Ordinary Man as an audio book on CD), and my sense of the ways light and darkness are intermingled and transformed in our individual lives and in social structures was greatly intensified as a result. Listening to a story being told is an ancient and visceral experience, and the rhythm and cadence of the reading made the goodness and evil in the account palpable. While there is no specific program to my piece, I believe that the restless and sometimes feverish imagery that I held from this story accounts for these elements that are substantially present in my quartet. In the larger frame, the poet Stanley Kunitz has captured the ultimate sense of transformation (“Reflections” from The Collected Poems): “Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once.”
—Robert Gibson
duration: ca. 10:00