KAY: String Quartet No.7

String Quartet No.7 (2020)

Subtitled Crisscross, my String Quartet is really a conglomerate of autonomous, unrelated short fragments that butt in on each other in quick succession, sometimes overlapping. They all return exactly as before or transform in obvious or more subtle ways, but in, perhaps different orders and not always predicably. The best analogy I can make is: as in a kaleidoscope. The form, therefore, is essentially under-developmental in the conventional sense. In one movement of three linked sections and much cross-referencing, its 15-minute duration concludes with a brief coda, firm, but, creating with it, a sense of ambivalence.