Proper Nostalgia

Details:
for String Quartet
22 minutes

Commissioned and recorded by Friction Quartet.

About the work:
When I was approached to write Proper Nostalgia, my only concrete instruction was to conceive of a piece for string quartet that was intended to be recorded. The final “work” becomes the recording rather than the score. As I began to explore the possibilities of what this instruction meant, I kept coming back to the question of what a recording represents. There is a difference between a “live” recording of a piece of music and a “studio” recording. One serves as documentation of an event at a specific time, and the other is a construct to represent a piece of music in its ideal form. In a sense, what I was considering was the push and pull of what is “truth” and what is “fiction”. For Proper Nostalgia, what I landed on was using two types of recording and having them work as a counterpoint to one another. The opening of the piece employs raw “home” recordings, DIY recordings of the quartet in their own personal spaces playing through these sections of the piece for maybe the first time, maybe the third or the tenth time. These “home” recordings return multiple times in the piece and are juxtaposed with various levels of artificiality in the studio recordings. Movements 2, 3, and 5 explore different ways of manipulating the sonic experience of a string quartet recording; elaborate electronic synthesis, manipulation of the perception of space, and the use of overdubbing—a tried and true studio effect that can offer limitless possibilities. What this all has to do with “nostalgia” came about when I realized that the DIY, verite style recordings serve as a kind of memory. These recordings capture not only the performances but also the space they were in, and, in some cases, the world outside of a window at that specific point in time. Recording as documentation; documentation as memory. I followed this rabbit hole and started to contemplate the idea of what memories mean to us; how they inform us, shape us, and deceive us. A memory is linked to our own personal perception of an event. Over time, our mind can even alter a memory to become what we think happened rather than what did happen. Are our memories truth, or are they a type of fiction? Maybe it doesn’t really matter after all.