Walker - Quartet Out of Time
Composed by Matt Walker, ALIAS cellist and co-founder.
Tracy Silverman, violin; Lee Levine, clarinet; Matt Walker, cello; Bruce Dudley, piano
This digital download is an .m4a format.
Composed by Matt Walker, ALIAS cellist and co-founder.
Tracy Silverman, violin; Lee Levine, clarinet; Matt Walker, cello; Bruce Dudley, piano
This digital download is an .m4a format.
Composed by Matt Walker, ALIAS cellist and co-founder.
Tracy Silverman, violin; Lee Levine, clarinet; Matt Walker, cello; Bruce Dudley, piano
This digital download is an .m4a format.
Quartet Out of Time explores different styles of music that are heard in Nashville’s broad-based music scene. It alludes to jazz and blues, folk, rock and gospel. The piece’s title is a sort of triple-play on words:
The instrumentation is the same as Messiaen’s iconic (and similarly-titled) Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). Like the famous work, Quartet Out of Time explores the instruments in different permutations.
The meter is often deliberately obscured, either by rubato or with changing metric patterns. Some sections therefore sound as if they are “out of time,” that is, not in rhythm.
The piece was completed just under the wire in advance of a deadline, leading the composer to feel like he was indeed “out of time.”
It begins with a wandering blues/gospel line in the clarinet, joined in unison by the cello and occasionally interrupted by the violin. Following is a slow, bourbon-soaked jazz-lounge set, the instruments pairing with each other in different duos. The violin and cello briefly create an atmosphere of Appalachian “high lonesome” sound. An odd-metered segment allows the piano to display some blues/rock riffs; this leads into an extended percussion break. (Yes, a drum solo with no drummer.) The percussion morphs into the finale, a raucous funk groove that rises and falls until nothing is left: It’s as if the musicians themselves are out of time, and their break finally begins - another aspect of Nashville’s music scene.