Ever Yours
Ever Yours (2022)
When the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale invited me to write an octet, I went back to re-read the letters from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. I was struck and inspired once again by the intensity of Vincent’s being in the world, his attention to all the different kinds of blues (in just one paragraph about a walk he took along the seashore, he talks about “the deep blue sky flecked with blues deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt”, and goes on to talk of the “blue whiteness of the Milky Way”… and finds in the sparkling stars “opals, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires…”). I was struck even more deeply by Vincent’s ending every letter to his beloved brother with an “ever yours”.
After 30 years of life and music adventures together, I feel that there is a quality of “everyourness” to the friendship between the St Lawrence String Quartet and me. Especially with Geoff Nuttall, to whom I am dedicating this piece, I feel a sense of brotherhood. I think he also lives in that state of everyourness, with the yourness part of the idea being his immense love for Haydn and his attention to, and delight in, every one of the extraordinary turns that Haydn’s quartets gift us; and Geoff’s love for, and attention to California’s native vegetation, and to each of his thousands of records, and, especially, to the extraordinary friends and musicians who play together with him in the St Lawrence String Quartet.
Vitality, Love and Attention. Somebody said that true love is attention. “Love-is-Attention” is what connects Haydn and Van Gogh. That concentrated attention that unveils new and new dimensions in what we all see and hear, but, many times, we fail to notice until they notice and they invite us to notice too.
Vitality, Love, Attention. In short, those are the qualities that I hope pervade this new work.