Eleanor Hovda
for string quartet
ca. 18'00"
"Lemniscates was composed for the Kronos String Quartet to be premiered at the New Music America, Miami, during the December 1988 Festival. The piece was developed, in large part, to work in the barely audible range. It is about excavating "sound around the sound," a sonic resource of stringed instruments rarely used in an acoustical setting.
The title Lemniscates derives from the Latin word "Lemniscus," meaning "with hanging ribbons." In mathematics, the word refers to the figure-of-eight shape, and is defined as follows: "the locus of the foot of the perpendicular from the center of a conic on its axis." The dance theorist, Rudolph von Laban, uses the word to describe figure-of-eight energy shapes drawn by the body in space. I use the word in all of the above contexts - to describe "ribbons of sound," to illustrate techiniques of bowing, and to provide a metaphor for the spacial motion of the sound ribbons, and the choreographed sonic scultpure created by the Kronos Quartet."
Click here to read a letter from Hovda to David Harrington, containing additional performance notes.