Shattering in Seven Pieces for Dream and Wedding and Death
for string quartet

Duration: 14'
Date: May 2022
Location: Cambridge, UK

Shattering in Seven Pieces for Dream and Wedding and Death is a string quartet composed from seven fragments of Reza Baraheni’s Shattering in Fourteen New Pieces for Dream and Wedding and Death (1993). I began from the spoken poem, treating its prosody as compositional material whose rhythms could be measured closely without being reduced to a regular metric scheme. I recorded my own recitation and worked from the temporal grain of that recording: the changing duration of syllables, the speed and interruption of utterance, the weight of pauses, and the movement of the speaking voice became points from which musical time could be constructed. Computer-assisted speech analysis was used to examine fluctuations of intonation, while rhythmic values were derived from the relation between the words themselves and the durations they acquired in speech. 

The process therefore began with transcription, though transcription soon altered what it received. Once the spoken material was measured, slowed, displaced, and reconsidered at different temporal scales, the prosodic shape of a phrase could generate quite different musical consequences depending on the pressure placed upon its duration. I used transformations of the recorded declamation to examine how the same verbal material behaved at different speeds, allowing the rhythmic character of Persian speech to remain recognisable while loosening its dependence on the original act of recitation. The resulting music carries a memory of speech rather than an audible imitation of it: syllabic duration becomes instrumental rhythm, intonational movement bears upon pitch, and the pauses around language acquire their own measurable weight. 

This relation between speech and musical time determines the notation. The changing time signatures operate as temporal coordinates, marking the duration within which a phrase, a silence, or a succession of phonetic events unfolds; they do not imply a continuously recurring accentual metre. Across much of the quartet, the four players therefore inhabit different metres and rhythmic subdivisions at once, producing a polymetric and polyrhythmic surface in which each line retains a degree of temporal independence. I came to think of this as a form of interpretative rubato: the notation is exact, sometimes extremely so, yet its precision is directed towards preserving the instability and elasticity of spoken prosody rather than eliminating them. The quartet is held together by relations among four individually articulated temporal lines, whose points of contact continually shift as the piece moves. 

The verbal traces retained in the score make this derivation visible. Hyphens within the boxed text divide words into phonetic syllables, dots indicate syllabic prolongation, and spaces preserve word boundaries; the rhythmic values above them register the corresponding durations, while détaché bowing gives successive syllables separate articulations. These markings are less a supplementary explanation of the score than a residue of the process from which the score was made. Language remains present after its semantic content has receded, carried into bow movement, duration, accent, interruption, and the physical coordination of four performers. 

What interests me most in this procedure is the point at which measurement ceases to guarantee identity. The work begins from a voice that can be recorded and analysed with considerable precision, yet the distribution of that voice across four string instruments changes the conditions under which it can be heard. A syllable becomes a gesture; a pause expands into structural time; several lines derived from one recitation begin to occupy incompatible temporal positions. The poem consequently survives in the quartet through displacement. Its prosody provides measure, but that measure is repeatedly stretched by the interpretative independence of the players, whose parts move beside, across, and occasionally into one another until moments of synchrony gather them again into a common temporal surface. In the final piece, as also near the end of the fourth, this convergence becomes especially pronounced, and the plurality that has governed much of the work briefly acquires the weight of a single ensemble body. 

Baraheni’s poem matters to the composition precisely because its language already places pressure on ordinary relations between syntax, prosody, interruption, and sense. My response was to carry that pressure into notation, where speech could leave its semantic domain and continue as rhythm, gesture, silence, and relation. Shattering remains, in this sense, a work about what survives when words are made instrumental: something of the poem has been measured with unusual exactitude, yet what returns through the quartet is stranger than transcription, suspended between the memory of a speaking voice and a musical temporality that the voice itself could never fully contain.

The work was recorded in Cambridge by Saman Samadi, violin I; Junya Makino, violin II; Polly Almond, viola; and Sarah Henderson, cello, and released in May 2023 as part of the album Thus Spoke Earth. 

RECORDING

Saman Samadi, Shattering for string quartet, performed by Saman Samadi, violin; Junya Makino, violin; Polly Almond, viola; Sarah Henderson, cello. in Thus Spoke Earth (Cambridge: Saman Samadi Collective, 2023).