Sonic labyrinths: form and creative process in like knotted strings (2022) for string quartet

Abstract

like knotted strings for string quartet was commissioned in 2020 by the New York City-based Jack Quartet (through their Jack Studio programme), completed in 2022 and premiered in January 2023. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, The Garden of Forking Paths (2018 [1941]), the character Stephen Albert describes the fiction of the author Ts’ui Pen as works which explore all the possible narrative alternatives, in contrast with other authors whose fiction considers only a single outcome. Gary Saul Morson (1994:19), addressing a similar subject, argues that narrative offers both advantages and challenges to our comprehension of time. The metatextual nature of these themes – infinity (related here to narrative possibilities), memory and perception – gave me the impetus to compose like knotted strings, where they are reflected in such a way that musical material comments on the creative process itself.