Windchill

What’s fascinating about a windchill is its ability to stipulate a feeling. When I check my weather app on winter mornings, I rarely look at the temperature and rather consult the windchill to understand that day’s feeling. After all, 40°F can feel like so many things; the fresh morning air on a walk around the neighborhood, a cloudy overcast afternoon inside with foreboding thunder, a frigid evening best spent sitting by a warm fire. Temperature, like many other things in life, is influenced by so many factors, and windchills have become our way of amalgamating the circumstances of the day into a digestible number. Windchill relies on similar factors determined by that day’s circumstances. Who makes up the audience? What’s on the performers’ minds? How do the artists communicate? Every performance, despite reading the same pages of music, is different. Same temperature, different feeling.

Windchill fuses the traditional string quartet with a completely improvised solo piano. The pianist is chosen randomly from the audience, creating space for endless unique performances.

Recorded as part of Living Sounds #3, Turner Hall, Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, Nashville, Tennessee, February 19, 2025. Audio credits to Blair Performance Archive and Technology Crew.