This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.

Dedicated to the Pacifica String Quartet

Program Note

This “oceanic” quartet was composed for the Pacifica Quartet with support from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard. While my first quartet was subtitled “Astral” after dedicatee the Orion String Quartet, my second quartet takes its aquatic focus from the Pacifica Quartet, whom I have the good fortune to work with at the Jacobs School of Music.

The music is partly inspired by memories of time at the Oregon coast in my youth, especially an annual month spent at an isolated, unnamed beach south of Cape Meares with its famous lighthouse and “Octopus tree” and north of Oceanside and the offshore Three Arch Rocks National Wildlife Refuge. This beach is one quarter of a mile long, bordered by high rocky bluffs, with a cliff in between facing the ocean; a rough road carved into the cliff face is the only means of accessing the beach except at a very low tide. The northern bluff is pierced by a Y-shaped tunnel called “Lost Boy Cave” that has openings to the beaches either side and the ocean in between. Depending on the shifting sand level and tide, it is sometimes possible to walk through to the neighboring beach, observing cave walls covered in starfish, mussels and barnacles, and tidepools with seaweed and sea anemones. Each summer for quite a few years, my family and another would rent a cabin above the cliff. While our working fathers were present mostly on weekends, the five kids and two mothers would spend a month at this unique and magical place. Playing at the edge of the great Pacific Ocean was an endless adventure: skimboarding and jumping waves in the frigid water, digging and designing elaborate games in the sand, building driftwood castles, climbing rocky faces and protrusions, exploring the windy forest atop the Northern bluff, finding agates, shells and if very lucky, Japanese glass floats in the surf, running the beach or even the log “highways” uphill from the layers of ocean, sand and surf-smoothed rockpile, and more. Everything seemed elemental, ancient, and a bit dangerous, with signs of life and death everywhere. As JFK said, “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.“

The Oregon coast memories served as prompt for the central movement of the quartet. Unmentioned above are the sounds at the beach, hints of which might be heard in the movement: the usual coastal sounds of water, wind and seagulls, but also the gurgling cacophony of water and sea life near and inside the cave; perhaps even sea lions barking from nearby Three Arch Rocks. Bergy Bits and Growlers are chunks of glacial ice, smaller than an iceberg, but still dangerous to ships; in the first movement they appear as interruptions to a rather “pacific," easy-going flow. Riptide/Icebreaker begins and ends with a doomed soul gasping for air and then swimming against relentless currents. The center of the movement imagines a powerful ship pushing through ice, bending and splitting the frozen ocean to the breaking point from within or above. our back on the ocean.

David Dzubay, June 11, 2018 (rev. Jan. 2021)