for Voice, Trombone, Cello, and Seismograms
by Andrew Michael
Why - What - Performers - Recording - Related Links
Why did I write the quartet?
Earthquake Quartet #1 is an outgrowth of a lecture of I have been giving since 1997. This lecture, "The Music of Earthquakes," mixes performance and lecture, music and science, acoustic instruments and computer generated sounds. A musician controls the source of the sound and the path it travels through their instrument in order to make sound waves that we hear as music. An earthquake is the source of waves that travel along a path through the earth until reaching us as shaking. It is almost as if the earth is a musician and people, including seismologists, are the audience who must try to understand what the music means. By listening to both music and the audio playbacks of the earth shaking, we explore this analogy and find new ways to learn about the earth, earthquakes, musical instruments and music. This lecture has been a popular feature at the USGS in Menlo Park, several Universities, and was an invited presentation at a symposium on science and art organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
At several of the lecture presentations, audience members asked if I thought about using the audio playbacks of the seismograms as elements in a piece of music. These sounds are rather percussive and so I decided to compose a quartet for trombone, cello, voice and seismograms. The instrumentation was set because the lecture includes these three instruments.
What is the quartet trying to say?
Earthquake Quartet #1 is a concept piece that attempts to describe the earthquake cycle where plate motions build up strain which is then suddenly released during earthquakes during its initial section. The latter part of the piece is based on the idea that society and culture, including music, takes place with the earthquakes as an often ignored backdrop although the geologic processes are an instrinsic part of our existence and ignoring them can have its consequences. Listeners, especially cellists and/or trombonists, may recognize that one theme from the second section is a rhythmically distorted quote from the Allemande of Bach's second suite for solo Cello which is then further inverted and modified.
The earthquakes are:
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the 1992 magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake in southern California as recorded at Parkfield, California This is the large rumble heard near the beginning.
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two recordings of a magnitude 2 earthquake at Parkfield and recorded at Parkfield on two different stations (beats 1 and 3).
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two recordings of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake at Parkfield recorded at both Parkfield (beat 2) and at Hollister, California (beat 4). Here, the fourth beat is the slower moving S wave while the pickup to the fourth beat is the faster moving P wave.