This piece is the consequent of the previous three quartets. It's impossible to put into words what these four pieces have meant to me as I've written them, which is exactly the reason that I decided to make this fourth one into the closure of those that came before. My first three quartets each explored an idea: memory, mortality, and identity.

 

The first quartet, “Reflections”, was about a series of unrelated but formative memories which I care very much about. The second, “Pathétique”, was an attempt to musically realize my experiences with suicide ideation and (at the time) my seemingly failing mental health. The third, “The Spectator”, was written in isolation during both the height of the pandemic and the 2020 uprisings, and was meant to capture the feeling of being disconnected, afraid, and completely unsure of my own place in it all.

 

I've finally reached a place in which I feel like I can calmly and clearly reflect on these things (and so many others), and that's what this fourth quartet is. It is not devoid of pessimism, fear, anguish, nor any of the other horrible feelings and ideas that pervade the second and third quartets, but this isn't because I've actively felt those things as I've written this piece; I've had the rare opportunity to reflect on my moments of weakness and despair and trauma, and I've had the opportunity to offer these things closure.

 

This was not planned from the beginning. I didn't set out writing my first quartet with the idea that it was going to be just the beginning of a set of works that would convey some kind of narrative. In each instance that I chose to write one of these string quartets, I wrote the music that I needed to write for myself. Because of that, it wound up being the case that the works do convey a narrative, and maybe this piece isn't the end of that, but I think it's important to know that this is the only piece that I wrote with the others explicitly in mind. This piece is, very intentionally, the consequent of the previous three quartets.