If this work seems cohesive, I think it’s due to the fact that each movement comes from the same basic investigative principle and the same working method. The basic investigative principle was: how can I use music to explore something fundamental about being a thought- and language-user, with all the contradictions and paradoxes and limitations that thought and language (and music!) produce? The working method was: spend a deadline-free, luxurious amount of time developing gestures and forms and ideas, and enlist my performer collaborators in the Wet Ink Ensemble to workshop with me every step of the way.
The three duo movements (now II, IV, and VI) were all written within the span of about two years and quickly became part of the Wet Ink rotation. While they each have their own particular concerns, it started to dawn on me over a couple of seasons of performing them regularly that they had things to say to each other, and that I wanted to find a way to weave them together-hence the idea of composing three quartets for the full group to balance out a whole program. The last duo (“The Crito”) premiered in fall 2012 and the first quartet (“Poetics”) in spring 2015. I think having a couple of years of getting really comfortable with the intimacy and ensemble virtuosity of the duos helped me carry that feeling into the larger pieces, so that there was the same atmosphere of experimentation, curiosity, and comfortable risk-taking in rehearsals and workshops with all four of us that there had been when it was just me and one other person. And of course I’d been working with percussionist Ian Antonio, flutist Erin Lesser, and violinist Josh Modney for so long at that point that I was really familiar not just with their formidable skills but with all my favorite sounds and tricks from them, which might also help maintain a sense of cohesion through the whole work.
Narratively, I did spend some time trying to think about what subject matter would be up to the task of providing a conceptual glue. While the duos have a lot in common with each other, it’s probably in their approaches to narrative that they differ most: the flute/voice duo, “Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say,” is a (relatively) straightforward text-setting of three profound and experimental but still comprehensible texts by Lydia Davis; the percussion/voice duo, “The Crito,” is a little stage play involving very literal characterization of the players; and the violin/voice duo, “Cipher,” is a more surreal and circuitous take on the problems of language. (This is my feeling about the duos, anyway: the individual listener’s mileage may vary!)
Unlike with the duos, I was approaching the quartets from the get-go as pieces that would be grouped together and that would have to relate both to each other and to these previously-composed works. I knew I wanted to involve a deep treatment of rhetoric, which led me to Aristotle-and from there I got excited about the idea that each quartet could be an Aristotelean examination of a language-adjacent topic, with which a duo could be paired. Hence, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” an examination of what makes good tragedy, leads into the flute duo with all its melodrama and pathos; “Rhetoric” leads into the percussion duo with its interpretation of a rhetorically-charged dialogue; and “Metaphysics” introduces the violin duo, which leaps off of the plane of literalness into abstractions.
The first time we performed a quartet hinging directly into a duo was a performance of “Poetics” and “Only the Words…” in the summer of 2015. It was really exciting for me as both a composer and a performer to experience the re-contextualization of a familiar piece, and to feel these movements slotting into place as part of something larger that was just starting to come into focus. Ultimately, the experience of the complete IPSA DIXIT is very cohesive for me personally, as a performer/composer, because I’m onstage the whole time with the same three players, continuing the wide-ranging musical conversation we’ve been having for the better part of a decade. Hopefully some of that aura gets communicated to the audience as part of the overall fabric of the piece.
