Digital Download

Score and Parts - Score accessed here. For parts (included in price), please contact composer at at30@nyu.edu

The quartet Restless Nation was originally conceived as a musical evocation of a year when the composer and his wife took their two children on a home-schooling expedition. Each movement reflects different aspects of the adventure from the children’s perspective: the open road, the sounds of insects and night animals, rambunctious and reflective moments, wilderness, and the journey home. Now, in this pandemic moment, the restless energy resonates with a sense of wanting to move in conflicting directions: inward toward the surety of solitude, and outward with the persistent hope to connect in an irreconcilable, endlessly fascinating world.

 The altered tuning of the first violin, borrowed from Arkansas fiddlers, is audible in the final (sixth) movement, driven by a fiddle tune called “The Hangman’s Reel.” Restless Nation was commissioned and premiered by the Cassatt Quartet at Symphony Space in New York City.