String Quartet #2, "White Wall"

By Scott Wollschleger

Performances

Mivos Quartet

Description

White Wall is an austere yet playful sound world which is based around white noise and fragments of sound. The central image of combing through a cultural landscape-turned-desert occupied my mind as I wrote the work. It is music written at the end of the world, i.e., today. White Wall also invokes a sense of touching and breathing. In shaping the white noise I tried to turn the quartet into a breathing apparatus that would always imply (concurrently and somewhat paradoxically) both a moving pattern and a simultaneous erasure of that pattern.  The first movement is a slow uncovering of a melody. The second movement is something of a dance that disintegrates. —S.W.