Time Saturates The Cloudy Night Sky (2022)

for for String Quartet and live-electronics

12 min

“Time is one of the most important parameters in music. It doesn’t just represent rhythm, but more importantly carries a structural force. The imagery of the title is for me like a weave of frosted textures in which the music (this experience of sound within absolute time) is hidden in itself. It’s like an endless glissandi upward movement, we can perceive the upward force through time, but due to the adjustment of the timbre (e.g. pressure, flageolets trill) it’s like a line seen in a light grey mist fog, a blurred outline, and it’s the ‘light’ that gives this texture. The “light” is the phrasing, which creates the “structural force”.
The solo piece is a cadenza from the string quartet of the same name. The two-minute cadenza is more like a ‘memoir’ evoking the memory of the material. The title… …Time, saturates the
cloudy night sky…(…時が、曇った夜空に滲みてゆく …) is taken from Shuntaro Tanigawa’s Poem “62 sonnets“