Abstract: Program Notes: Intricate Machines was composed for the 2016 Saarbrücken Somermusik festival in Germany. The festival theme was “travel to foreign lands” and this piece, in some sense, represents a larger journey from the chaos of the outside world into a more peaceful sphere of inner reflection. Each of the five movements is connected together and played without pause. Beginning with dense and rhythmic outbursts, the first movement (“Heavy-Metal Viola”) imagines a musical offspring of Bartok and Metallica somehow fused together by string quartet. The second movement (“Bump in the Night”) focuses on juxtaposition: a lone, delicate, solo violin hums quietly, only to face jarring interruptions from the ensemble underneath. Ending with an introspective chorale, the second movement gives way to movement three (“Churning Gears”) in which fast and repetitive ostinatos create a dense interlocking musical machine. The fourth movement (“Constellations”) begins with an eruption of heavy, sustaining, chords that are played freely, out of time. These vibrating orbs of sound gradually recede into distant and ethereal harmonics. Suggesting a celestial atmosphere, the solo cello gently sings a muted melody, leaving us in a place of transformation relative to the earlier movements. Movement five, a playful folk-dance, completes the total journey as an overt contrast to the tense opening movements. Amidst its quirky and bizarre groove, elements of rock, funk, folk-fiddling, and pedal-tone drone music, are assimilated into what composer Steven Mackey describes as “a vernacular music from a culture that doesn’t really exist”—or as I phrase it here, a “Martian Jukebox Hoe-down.”
