I composed “the rest rubble and nettles” specifically for Johnna Wu, a friend and astonishing violinist (and founding member of PinkNoise Ensemble). The work is composed for a violin strung with an octave G string, meaning the fourth string of the instrument sounds a full octave lower, while the rest of the strings remain in the original octave. This peculiar setup inspired my music in two ways. First, I was free to develop harmonies that rely on super wide voicings that stretch well beyond the range of a standard violin. Second, a spectral analysis of the open octave IV string revealed many stretched overtones (similar to the struck strings of a piano), with an especially prominent third partial. From this insight, I developed a scale based on a 710-cent fifth (8 cents larger than Just Intonation) as the harmonic basis for the piece. The music thus divides the octave into 120 equal parts.

“the rest rubble and nettles” is—at least in part—a piece about reflection. The violinist and listener constantly retrace their steps, but nothing is ever the same as before. I decided on a title only after finishing the score, as is usually my practice. It is taken from Samuel Beckett’s one-act play That Time (1974), in which three disembodied voices swirl around a floating head, each recounting different memories. One voice (“A”) describes an attempt to find an old folly where they would hide as a child, discovering only a “bit of a tower still standing all the rest rubble and nettles.” Beckett’s flowing, punctuation-free prose spoke to my music’s shifting tempos and fluid pitch language, while the abstract formalist structure was echoed (very differently) in my music’s stark contrasts. The “A” voice’s shift towards uncertainty is particularly resonant, with the play’s opening line, “that time you went back…,” returning in increasingly unsure variations: “or was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time…”

I hope the music can offer listeners a space to reflect on change, continuity, and uncertainty.

[for more recordings: https://soundcloud.com/scott-allen-miller ]