Following the success of their 2017-18 collaboration (Bozzini+, Piano Quintet, HCR19), the Bozzini Quartet is reunited with composer Bryn Harrison for Harrison's first string quartet, the three-movement, hour-long Three Descriptions of Place and Movement (2021). A fi-rst string quartet is a landmark moment for any composer, but Harrison's feels like a particularly signi-ficant arrival: the homogenous instrumentation is ideally suited to the disorienting labyrinthine structures, intricate repetitions, and extended durations that have characterized much of his recent work. The title's three 'descriptions' are clarifi-ed in the names of the movements. Opening, clearing, and burrow-all doubly verbs and nouns-are each embedded with simultaneous motion and stasis. Opening, an unfolding, widening, growing from a single point, as well as the aperture, the crevice, the window that frames the perception of space. Clearing, a kind of purging or scrubbing of materials down to their barren core, or a wide empty space, ‑at and nondescript, de-fined by the negative. And burrow, to carve deeper, to dig into, to bury oneself completely, or an underground cocoon, warm, enveloping, home.

Originally written for orchestra, Phill Niblock’s Disseminate (1998) and Baobab (2011) were arranged by the composer specifically for the Bozzini Quartet, or rather, for ‘multiples’ of the Quartet: twenty different tracks are mixed in each piece — twenty different instruments, the equivalent of five string quartets. The music is essentially a work on the shifting nature of overtone patterns that arise from acoustic instruments. As composer Robert Ashley convincingly argued, these pieces inscribe themselves in the “hardcore drone” scene of American electronic music: “Niblock [brings] the orchestra into the electronic world.” For Disseminate and Baobab, Niblock scored a distinct set of microtonal intervals, and the players are indicated how sharp or flat they should play. But a certain sense of range is given around each chromatic pitch, so that every bow stroke partly determines the microtones.