UC Berkeley

Composed in 2019 and revised and expanded in 2022, Three Hommages is a work for string quartet. It was premiered by Tana Quartet in Berkeley, California. The work is in four movements, all of which revolve around the ideas connected to musical time and synchronization. The music score serves as the main body of this dissertation with the written component provided as analytical supporting material.Two composers and a novelist are the main influences for this work: Witold Lutosławski and Conlon Nancarrow’s compositions, especially those composed for the string quartet medium- are primary influences. Both composers tried using different methods to create an out-of-sync feeling. Nancarrow, just like in Three Hommages, uses the time signature 1/4 in his String Quartet No. 3, and uses different subdivisions to create four different tempi for the four instruments. Lutosławski on the other hand, uses four different systems for all instruments in his String Quartet. Most of the time, the performers play their parts independent from each other, with different synchronization points in which they come together. In addition to these two composers, Three Hommages takes its literal inspiration from a Turkish novel, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar. This novel is about a fictional institute responsible for synchronizing all the public clocks in a city. The first and third movements of Three Hommages are exactly about going from an out- of-sync to an in-sync state, whereas the second and final movements do the opposite, in which all the instruments start in-sync and slowly go out-of -sync. The process of going to in-sync is planned very thoroughly, and the method devised in this work is analyzed in depth in this text. The reverse process is composed freely, since going from order to chaos is a natural process.