String Quartet #2, "White Wall"

White Wall is an austere yet playful sound world which is based around white noise and fragments of sound. The central image of combing through a cultural landscape-turned-desert occupied my mind as I wrote the work. It is music written at the end of the world, i.e., today. White Wall also invokes a sense of touching and breathing. In shaping the white noise I tried to turn the quartet into a breathing apparatus that would always imply (concurrently and somewhat paradoxically) both a moving pattern and a simultaneous erasure of that pattern.  The first movement is a slow uncovering of a melody. The second movement is something of a dance that disintegrates. —S.W.