String Orchestra (string quartet forthcoming)

7m 30 s duration

for the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty of Music 50th Anniversary

Program Note:

This work is in a continuation of works in my catalogue that engage with space and place; with how we are shaped, and shape, our built environment. W here Light Lingers Longest takes inspiration from site specific elements and then asks us to shift our gaze as we look elsewhere with new perspectives. This work is inspired by my experience visiting the Shanghai Tower. It is currently the 3rd tallest tower in the world, and tallest tower in China as of April 2025.

W here Light Lingers Longest is a musical depiction of the building’s layout, floorpans, and physical structure translated into musical language; the music also captures my sentiment and emotions while visiting the tower. The buildings height, elevator speed, number of floors and geographic location are are translated into pitch, rhythmic, and timbral musical elements. The structure of the work while on one level is a loose theme and variations, it is also a metaphor from my experience on the ground floor, rising up through the world fastest elevator, to carry me to the top of the tower looking back down on the city, looking down into clouds, and into sun light lingering amongst the steel.

The variations are shorter musical ideas, with some development but end as soon as they get started, much like my trip to the tower, I was and am confronted with moments of fleeting beauty; quick to dissolve into memory, they remind us to wander, to explore, and to savour moments that linger on past their initial instance.

Theme: measures 1 -33, translate the height of the building in meters and feet into pitch content. The harmonic content captures my anticipation , anxiety, and deeper emotional connection to the visiting experience.

Variation 1 “like wind on steel”: mixes muted and non muted writing with tremolo usage, harmonic gestures, and pizzicato intertwined with sustaining notes that evoke the sense of the wind whisping and lingering around the gently curving steel structure.

Variation 2 “echoes”: explores varying intensities of texture and counterpoint; sustained notes on the outskirts of the musical landscape with fleeting florid lines pulsing away from within the texture represent the tower’s dominance on the landscape and the juxtaposition of humans impact along the Huangpu river.

Variation 3 “hymn to the horizon”: features arpeggiando – dance like gestures to represent emotions of excitement as we buzz on top of the world; tremolo and constant perpetrum mobile techniques capture the atmosphere, this pitch content in this variation is taken from the speed and construction of the elevator itself.

Variation 4 “spiralling upwards”: inspired by elevator ride itself; a change in timbre with plucked techniques, glissandi, and shifts in bow placement create a new sonic environment to capture the closterphobia elevator ride as we emerge from the underground entrance to high above clouds in only 55 seconds. Fragments of other previously heard motivic gestures are heard alongside indeterminate high pitches.

Variation 5 “above the city, still” : the meter is now elongated into 7/4; motives are drawn out like taffy, suspended in time (air); above the world. The change in height and perspective is represented by glissandi, harmonics, and return of opening harmonic content.

*All three slash tremolo to indicate unmeasured, fast tremolo technique

** The glissandi to highest pitch on single string, up to each individual performer what that pitch is, unsynchronized: you don’t

need to arrive / glissandi exactly at the same speed.

*** long durations bow as needed