Julian Stuart-Burns - Everything That Begins...

Performed at the Societat Ateneu Musical del Port in Valencia, Spain as part of VIPA 2024.

Mivos Quartet
Olivia de Prato, Violin
Maya Bennardo, Violin
Victor Lowrie Tafoya, Viola
Nathan Watts, Cello

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Everything That Begins… plays with some ideas of form that I have been considering for several months now. My most recent pieces have dealt with forms oriented around short segments that build up and juxtapose similar musical ideas—or ones that are severely contrasting—only for the edifice to collapse entirely, ushering in new iterations of this process. While moments of collapse are relatively sparse over the course of this piece, the quick succession of the four movements creates a sonic environment where the listener is continually in suspense as to what will come next.

This piece takes its title from a refrain found in a succession of micro-chapters contained within Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. As a matter of copyright, I will not copy the passage down here, but those who have read the book will likely be familiar with the segment in question. In one of these micro-chapters, Bolaño puts forth a theory of works of art, criticism, and readership that had quite an effect on me upon reading it. Everything That Begins… could even be seen in its form to mimic this trajectory of a work’s lifespan that Bolaño traces, though that certainly was not my intention upon setting out to right this piece. This piece owes a great deal to well-known works of other composers—Henri Dutilleux, Hans Abrahamsen, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Gyorgy Kurtag, among others—and there are certainly moments in this piece where each of these influences shines a bit brighter than the others. The title thus pays homage to that genesis and evolution of the work of art—and its reception—with which I have been fascinated for my whole adult life so far.