Robert Carl

String Quartet or Open Quartet

Composer's Note:

The work is ideally scored for string quartet, though arrangement for other instruments with analogous capacities is allowed. If so, certain "string specific" instructions should be suitably modified.
Ideally, the pieces should proceed in the order given, and the texts which follow each as epilogues should be projected rather than spoken. Those texts may also be in a program note, and if performers wish to explore an alternative order, it is permitted. Possible selections from the set may also be performed as a shorter work.
Because of the relative brevity of these pieces, and the often fluid ensemble, the players should perform from the full score.
The physical arrangement of players, and the use of any performance space to enhance the effects suggested in the piece, will be contingent on specific circumstances. It may therefore be useful for the musicians to collaborate with a stage director, choreographer, and/or acoustician to bring the piece to its fullest realization.
Approximate total time: 16'. But due to flexibility allowed with many G.P.s, that figure (as well as those listed after individual movements), should not be considered exact.
This set of "mutetudes" is but a brief, and obviously inadequate, effort to deal with an issue of this scope. Some of the pieces consider silence from a more conceptual viewpoint, others from a more concretely acoustical one...and of course these two blend.
I can only hope the work may serve to raise questions about the way that we hear, indeed viscerally experience, silence in different ways, and that it will stimulate a host of further ideas and interpretations for both listeners and other creators.