String Quartet #2 was written during my first months as a parent. My ongoing interest in the interdependence of structure and feeling in music found an analogue in watching a developing life with its own mysterious link between internal process and emerging personality.
The compositional technique does not mimic any actual biological process, but the slow mutation of strands of melody at the opening of the first movement might represent life’s beginnings, with an unpredictable evolution. The third movement gives a more robust rhythmic personality to some of the same material. The intervening slow movement is contemplative and set in the Lydian mode (a major scale with a raised fourth), or actually two Lydian scales an augmented fourth apart, combining to give all of the notes on the piano.