CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New music by composer Stephen Andrew Taylor conveys the experience of the coronavirus pandemic, and it also represents the structure of one of the coronavirus proteins.
The world premiere of Taylor’s “Chaconne/Labyrinth” will be April 3 in a virtual concert by the Jupiter String Quartet, artists-in-residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music commissioned the new work from Taylor, a professor of composition-theory in the U. of I.’s School of Music. The performance can be viewed for free on the organization’s website beginning April 3, and it will be available for 30 days after the premiere. The ensemble’s performance was recorded at Smith Memorial Hall on campus.
Taylor was asked last year to write a piece for seven to eight instruments, but when it became clear it would not be possible to gather all those musicians together during the pandemic, he wrote a piece for the Jupiter String Quartet.
Taylor had been experimenting with representing the biological structures of the coronavirus in sound.
With the commissioned piece, he began writing a series of chords that kept repeating, like the 12-bar blues, he said. Chaconne is a name for a repeating chord progression. Such repetition can be a metaphor for our experience of the passage of time, Taylor said.
“As I kept messing around with the chords, it started to go off in different directions. I realized it was kind of like a maze. I started thinking about getting lost in a maze and realized it was like being stuck in this pandemic, wandering around and trying to find a way out,” Taylor said.
“In the original labyrinth in Greek mythology, there’s a horrible monster in the center of it. Instead of a monster, I have the virus,” he said.
When the quartet’s performance reaches the center of the maze in the middle of “Chaconne/Labyrinth,” a violent break in the music is followed by an abstract, frenzied sound – the section of music depicting the coronavirus protein, Taylor said.
He wrote that piece of music and several others based on the coronavirus “without any idea of them being executed by humans. They were not meant to be performable,” he said, adding that the compositions were part of a long tradition of music written to be played only on synthesizers.
6vyo from Stephen Taylor on Vimeo.
The music represents proteins whose chains of amino acids twist and turn. Taylor used different pitches and timbres for the structures of the various amino acids. The music changes to a new key to indicate the twists and turns of the chain, and the tempo of the music also changes and is quite complex.
“It is extremely fast and extremely intricate, rhythmically. Things happen at fractions of tempos,” Taylor said. “I really thought the Jupiters would come back and say, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not possible to be performed by human beings,’ but they just nailed it.”
After encountering the monster/virus, the quartet retraces its way back through the maze by way of the same musical material used in getting to the center of the labyrinth.
Taylor has long been interested in writing music based on science. But in recent years, his compositions have not been inspired by science, but rather represent scientific data itself.
“Beethoven would depict thunderstorms along the banks of a creek. Now we could depict the molecular dynamics of water,” Taylor said. “It’s a modern updating of a very ancient musical representation.”