daisy (2024) 30'
string quartet
commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia, Kings Place, Newport Classical, String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam, Park Avenue Armory, and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
program note
My piece daisy was commissioned specifically to be premiered on a program with George Crumb’s Black Angels — one of my favorite pieces, and also one of the great quartets written in my lifetime. I wasn’t asked to compose a new piece that would react to Black Angels but I couldn’t help but think about it, while writing my own quartet. The piece was formative for me — I was 13 years old when Black Angels was written, 15 when I bought the first recording, 16 when I heard it in the soundtrack of the film “The Exorcist,” and 19 when I first heard it live, played by the Kronos Quartet.
One thing that is almost always mentioned when people discuss Black Angels is that it was written during the Vietnam War. Crumb dates the score “in tempore belli 1970” — in time of war. And you can hear it, in the dark and tragic intensity of the music. I remember that time in my country, very well. I was too young to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but old enough to feel the great upheaval and pain in my community, all around me.
America’s president just before Black Angels was composed was Lyndon Baines Johnson [LBJ]. He was responsible for the massive escalation of America’s presence in Vietnam, which was a little ironic, since LBJ had campaigned for president as the candidate who promised not to destroy the world. His campaign included what many consider the most effective political ad in American history — it featured an innocent young girl plucking the petals off a flower, who is then interrupted by the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. The name of the ad was “Daisy.”
My quartet daisy remembers this moment in American history, and it proposes two different futures for the innocent. The opening movement — ‘first daisy’ — begins in a gentle openness that is soon forgotten, and taken for granted, and which then becomes relentlessly overwhelmed. The concluding movement — ‘second daisy’ — imagines what might happen if that gentle and open spirit could be believed, and valued, and supported, and preserved.