Waiting in Silence

Waiting In Silence — string quartet | 4:00 | composed in April of 2025 | premiered in April 2025 at the Bloomington Arts Center

This work was written as part of the Nature Walk Collaboration with the Biology department. In visiting the biomes that Salamanders inhabit, I was struck by the sounds they make and how our mere presence, standing at the edge of a pond or moving closer to them, causes them to go silent. This piece is a sonification of this phenomenon.

The piece uses three different textures: small cells of improvisation with select figures and col legno string articulations that mimic the sounds and rhythms of salamanders; a melodic line that passes among different members of the quartet that most directly embodies human interaction/presence in the environment, and non-vibrato double-stopped chord swells that are indicative of our observation of the environment.

As the human presence in the melodic figures and chord swells becomes more technically demanding and rapid-fire, the salamander sounds are crowded out, receding into non-existence. The piece ends with a gradual decrease in human presence, allowing the salamander sounds to resurface.