ENS.1998.3 | 5′
String Quartet
Cities of the Plain
Cities of the Plain is my first acknowledged composition. Composed in October 1998, the second month of my freshman year at the Manhattan School of Music, this piece references the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the books of the same name by Marcel Proust and Cormac McCarthy. The image in my mind as I worked was not the vengeance meted out upon the cities but its still, broken aftermath. Modal fragments reminiscent of the Medieval and Renaissance music I was then studying emerge from silence and return to it, building once to a climax before subsiding into stillness. Although brief and not particularly revelatory of my mature music to come, for me Cities of the Plain stands as perhaps my first work of any significance.