Blair String Quartet - World Premiere

The Blair String Quartet presents the world premiere of Images From a Closed Ward, a work the group commissioned from groundbreaking American composer Michael Hersch and the first string quartet he has written in more than 20 years. The work was commissioned as part of The Blair Commissions: Music for the 21st Century, through funding from the James Stephen Turner Family Foundation. The Quartet will also premiere the work later in the spring in Philadelphia and at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

COMPOSER’S STATEMENT

I first came into contact with artist Michael Mazur's work in 2000, while I was living in Italy. An exhibition of Mazur's The Inferno of Dante, a series of forty-one etchings with accompanying texts of Dante translated into English by Robert Pinsky, was being shown at the American Academy in Rome. Viewing the collection of etchings was among the most powerful experiences I have ever had. Soon after we met, Mazur would often stop by the space I used to work in, where I would then play through many of my own compositions. Although we worked in very different mediums, I often felt that Mazur understood what I was doing better than most.

 In mid-2009, for the first time in almost 20 years, I began work on a string quartet; the catalyst for which was an encounter the previous year with two groups of etchings done by Mazur in the early 1960s: the Closed Ward and Locked Ward series. The images are devastating ones.  Why I was attracted to them, how they resonated with and why they haunted me, are for reasons that remain personal. That said, the fact that visual art became something of an ignition point for my own work was a very new experience for me. As the summer of 2009 wound down, I had formulated the broad outlines of the work enough that I decided it would be a good time to reconnect with Mazur. I was extremely excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and sharing the terrain of this new quartet. I felt that he would be surprised and pleased that something he had done had a hand in the shaping of this new work. The day before I planned to contact him, I read of his untimely death in a Sunday newspaper.              

— Michael Hersch

Sponsored by the James Stephen Turner Family Foundation