1 / 46
0:00/0:00
String Quartet
2025
Cello
Viola
Violin
- Program Notes
- I composed No One Owns the Current in collaboration with Lucas Fang, Houston’s 2024-25 Youth Poet Laureate. The piece responds to the four poems from Letters Folded Into Water, a collection Lucas wrote in celebration of Houston’s historic Vietnamese business district. Drawing from his own experience, Lucas’s poems explore the nature of belonging within an immigrant community, capturing a relationship to language, tradition, and family that is simultaneously full of warmth and longing. A string quartet felt like the ideal medium to express this shifting experience of belonging. The instruments’ wide range of techniques - bowing, plucking, rolled chords, metallic timbres, pitch bends - become musical identities for each player. At times, all four instruments share a unified sound world, embodying collective identity; at other moments, one instrument slips outside that shared space, finding itself just beyond the world that the others inhabit.
- Recording Notes
Performed by MUSIQA
- Publisher
- Theo Chandler