Duration: 13 min.
Some of the 16 strings of this ensemble are tuned to pitches not found on the piano but present in the natural harmonics of the strings. I hope the listener will experience the sounds from this canonical ensemble in unfamiliar but refreshing ways, what poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor called "awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us." The naturalist John Muir may have had this Romantic ideal in mind when he described the highlands of Scotland: "The ordinary sensations which mountains arouse do not fit these extraordinary rock shapes and yet they are not terrifying in any way, but merely strange....The movement of wild mountain scenery is generally a tossing movement as of waves...the summits of which rise out of these billows like rocks out of a sea and seem to belong to a different order. They are bold and regular and yet unexpected in their shape, as if they were the result of a wild kind of geometry."