Matthew Pickard and Anton Smirnov, violins; Kate Kroko, viola; Lian Qiao, cello.

String quartet Intimate Stream[s] was influenced by ideas from Gestalt psychology and Albert Bregman’s concept of auditory streams. Musically, it portrays a single harmonic stream comprised of multiple melodic lines whose individual lines merge from consonance to dissonance, resulting in a harmonic syntax with the rising and falling pitch and loudness curves. The conceptual processes enhance the musical flux and control the ever- changing experience of a single musical object. Hence, timbral variations in the quartet result not only in the melodic/harmonic contour of consonance and dissonance, but also from an impression of evolving sound envelopes whose dynamic curves accompany time-varying contrapuntal arabesques. The harmonic language in the piece reflects the beginning of my research in a personal harmonic grammar inspired by cognitive attributes of sound as a metaphor for musical syntax, notably in the exploration of my newly discovered harmonic and rhythmic sonance modes. Compositionally, the title refers to the perceptual concept of multiple auditory streams, and instrumentally as a discussion of four friends that constantly converges into a single conversational stream.

Written in 2008 and recently revised reflects my ongoing exploration of musical syntax as an interplay of music cognition and philosophy, notably of the perception of musical harmony-timbre and notions of musically sublime.