Aqua

17 min.

February 16, 2012
Bargemusic, Brooklyn, NY
Avalon String Quartet

Commissioned for the Avalon, Lydian, and Pacifica Quartets through the award of the 2008 Barlow Prize by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University

A Paul Goldberger piece in The New Yorker magazine introduced me to architect Jeanne Gang’s mesmerizing Aqua Tower in Chicago. Goldberger begins his description: “Aqua—a new, eighty-two-story apartment tower in the center of Chicago—is made of the same tough, brawny materials as most skyscrapers: metal, concrete, and lots of glass. But the architect, Jeanne Gang, a forty-five-year-old Chicagoan, has figured out a way to give it soft, silky, lines, like draped fabric… You know this tower is huge and solid, but it feels malleable, its exterior pulsing with a gentle rhythm.” I collected photographs of the skyscraper, from different vantage points, in different light. And in April 2011, the quartet already well underway, I was in Chicago, walking around and around the building. The interconnected episodes of the string quartet work at replicating both the building’s rippling surface and its “brawny materials.”

“Harold Meltzer responds to the undulating surface of architect Jeanne Gang’s distinctive Chicago skyscraper of the same name…. The music had a sense of constant rhythmic pulse, but at any given moment violinists Blaise Magniere and Marie Wang, violist Anthony Devroye and cellist Cheng-Hou Lee swirled and danced away in syncopated riffs. Their melodies sounded spicy and unpredictable but always driven by an undercurrent of seamless flow and forward momentum. Like the surface of Gang’s apartment building, Meltzer’s Aqua was full of energy with few sharp edges.”

 
“For his string quartet, Aqua, composer Harold Meltzer has drafted a variation on the aphorism, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” He has written a piece about architecture.
 
“If music has the capacity to elicit a three-dimensional vision, this was it. With little imagination on the listeners’ part, Meltzer connected palpably to architect Jeanne Gang’s 86-story, 859-foot Chicago high-rise, Aqua Tower. Waves of arpeggios, glistening warmth, darkening shadows and splashes of light conjured the passage of clouds and sun on the building’s exterior, its billowing balconies undulating softly through slowly unfolding dissonant harmonies.
 
“Meltzer, who spoke to the audience about his compositional process, compared it with the haystacks Monet pained at various seasons and times of day. Like the tower, this music lifted and soared, if only in the imagination. If, as Goethe contended, architecture is frozen music, Meltzer has provided a thawing mechanism.”

 
“The concert ended with Harold Meltzer’s Aqua, a boldly episodic string quartet lasting 20 minutes. In various sections the strings play aggressive, astringent arpeggios, break into spiky chords, then segue into meditative stretches of tart yet celestial harmonies, and more. Over all, the music comes across as at once exhilarating and dangerous.”