Smoke Rings (2015)

Duration: 7:00 minutes

Smoke Rings (String Quartet) - Performance Materials

$15.00

Instrumentation: string quartet (also for string orchestra and cello quartet)

Premiere: December 12, 2015 at L'Alliance Française, New York, NY by the Attacca Quartet

Tom Huizenga | November 18, 2016 - Classical music observers say we're living in a golden age of string quartets. It's hard to disagree when you hear the vibrant young players in New York's Attacca Quartet. They revere the old school, having recently completed a performance cycle of all 68 string quartets by Joseph Haydn, the man who invented the genre.

Notes:

Smoke Rings is about wandering thoughts and idle speculation. The inspiration for this work comes from the 14th century rondeau Fumeux fume par fumee (Smoky smokes through smoke) by Solage. This bizarre and intensely chromatic song is itself a parody of the Society of Smokers, a group of poets and musicians who gathered to engage in “smoky speculation” and perhaps even smoke hashish or opium to induce whimsical artistic fantasies.

Smoke Rings opens with a hypnotically repeating pizzicato over which harmonies drift and transform like a shifting smoky haze. The main motives are obsessively repeated, touching on remote key areas without ever settling into any one of them, building to a passionate outburst, before returning to the music from the opening.

The title comes from another song about idle speculation, from a much later but no less self-indulgent age: “Where do they go, those smoke rings I blow each night? Oh, what do they do, those circles of blue and white?”