Abstract
The musical work presented herein represents the summation of my compositional craft. The work takes the form of a large inverted arch that begins with soft high pitches, gradually moves to the lowest registers of the strings as it grows in volume, and ends with music that is similar to the beginning. Much of the pitch material is derived from the harmonics of the individual strings of each instrument of the quartet. I used the sum and difference tones of these initial group of pitches to derive an extended pitch collection. The piece is an intricately woven mesh of textural and motivic counterpoint. There are very few sectional divisions, and the shift from one idea to the next occurs gradually and in steps, rather than all at once.