These are some thoughts I wrote about Rob’s String Quartet, Aur, shortly after I first heard it in 2020 or so. I found them incidentally, while I was rummaging around in my documents for other things, but I had been fretting since his death that so little had been said or written about such a wonderful body of work, and when I stumbled across these I thought it might be nice to put them out there. Please forgive the flowery language; this was intended for a much smaller audience.
There is a particular knot for tying mooring lines on canal-sides; it is called a taught line hitch. When the boat is not trying to escape, the line is loose enough to account for changes in the depth of the water, such that it may rise and fall without sinking. If the boat should lurch out, conspiring with the wind or the backwash of another boat passing, the knot rapidly tightens. Since I have already embarked on the project of making new names for everything, the only way back is to make new things from old names.
Aur is a taught-line hitch tethered to itself. It yearns to break free; it struggles in glissandi. It thrashes around quite desperately and frantically, and in so doing it tightens its own lines. This piece demands turntables; because if it is to circumscribe itself, it stands to reason that it must circumscribe history, too. We might suspect they would stretch outward with some recognizable sample or turntablist techniques, but they yearn to meet the string quartet, just as the string quartet yearns to escape. If everything yearned a little less, they might break free. The line is at its loosest when movement stills.
Nonetheless, I empathize deeply: there is a certain comfort in cocoons generated by yearning. I think about goal-orientation. I am convinced that this is a goal-oriented piece; only, that the goal is out of its reach, and if it were ever to make a convincing move toward it, it would be a different piece entirely. Let me concretize this a little: each voice forms an assemblage constantly pushing against its own boundaries, making renewed efforts; trying something different, but always somehow the same: first awake and shimmering; now tender, now confused; later, clinging; remembering, forgetting. Perhaps we try it differently, but we always try it.