treatises for an unrecovered past for string quartet (2013)

Treatises for an Unrecovered Past for String Quartet [2013-2017] I – NODE: Tuning Knot II – Recently Found Fragments: Chant Loop III – Striding Rituals: Nocturnal Gatherings for Mass Wooing III.5 or 5.IV – Optional habits IV – CODEX: I know I know this (…almost remembering…) V – Turn the Corner: Post-Rapture Celebration VI - NODE: Ex nihilo…In nihil [-for Mary Ruth-]

-for the Lydian String Quartet, with special thanks to Marty & Jerry Cohn-

The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.

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treatises for an unrecovered past for string quartet (2013)

Published on Mar 12, 2021

Kurt Rohde

I have no idea if this string quartet will survive. I’ve told myself that this music is for now; it’s not confessional, it’s not representational, but it is a glimpse into the parts of my life that are most private. My acknowledgement of my mortality plays strange games inside this private space – I am here now, but I will be gone someday, and with the passage of time (it won’t be all that long now…), I will be forgotten altogether. All the things I will have done while alive, like writing this music, will be lost. It happens to everyone; no one is spared. What if, by some freak stroke of luck, some of my music, only bits and pieces here and there, did survive into a future when no one knew much of anything about me? What if those future discoverers tried to reassemble those found fragments, producing a piece and a performance of the music with the best available scholarship regarding performance practice? An assembly of a memory that never happened.

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