Discover, Drill, Create

for string quartet
Performed by Friction Quartet
July 12, 2024, Dublin, NH (The Walden School’s Young Musicians Program Faculty Commissioning Concert)

2024 marks the 10th year that I’ve been a part of the Walden School’s community, from my first summer as a student at the Young Musicians Program in 2014 to the present where I am now faculty at the same program. To celebrate that, I wanted to write a piece that embodied campiness as much as possible – in both a Walden School/summer camp way and also in a broader sense of the camp aesthetic (think the Twilight Saga, the Star Wars prequels, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, etc).

Susan Sontag writes in Notes on ‘Camp’ that “[Camp] is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not… Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’… In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails… Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”

Campiness often finds its way into Walden’s pedagogical methods due to repetition (the catchphrase of the pedagogy is “Discover, Drill, Create”). Thus, I repeated many elements of the Walden School’s musicianship curriculum for this piece, including the overtone series, the “Magic 8” 2/4 rhythms, the drill order, close voice leading in the cycle of 5ths, the grand pivot drill, and the Non Nobis Domine canon often attributed to William Byrd.

Special thanks to Friction Quartet and the Walden School’s Faculty Commissioning program.