for string quartet (2022-5)
63′
no.1 – 10’30
no.2 – 10’50
no.3 – 9’45
no.4 – 10’50 with fern pinnae
no.5 – 11’00
no.6 – 9’45 with cypress sprigs
f.p. Quatuor Bozzini, MUSICON Durham, 25 November 2025
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To inhabit the open is…to be immersed in the fluxes of the medium, in the incessant movements of wind and weather. Life is borne on these fluxes which, felt rather than touched, permeate the inhabitant’s entire being. In this weather-world there is no distinct surface separating earth and sky. Life is rather lived in a zone in which substance and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, bind the weather-world into the textures of the land…
Tim Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather”
weatherworld quartets is a cycle of six quartets, each around 10 minutes long, exploring our sensory and bodily experience of the outdoors – the ‘weatherworld’. Their sonic landscape is pervaded by rain and wind, sounding out the surfaces and bodies of the instruments in a shifting weave of harmonics, open strings and unpitched noise; sustained, glanced, brushed, tapped. In two quartets the bow is replaced by plant materials – fern fronds and cypress sprigs – heightening the exploration of an intimate, immersed way of being in the natural world.