「採譜」'Saifu'

Date of composition: October 2016
Instrumentation: violin I, violin II, viola, cello
Duration: 3'
 

I first came upon the idea for this string quartet piece during my self study of Japanese (a hobby I took up around 2015). The word ‘saifu’ (not to be confused with the more common homophone for ‘wallet’「財布」), is made up out of the characters for ‘to take/pluck/gather’ and ‘music paper’, giving it the nuance of "plucking notes and gathering them onto music paper". I was so enamoured with this word that a concept started forming immediately.

This also reminded me of a conversation I had had at that time with my composition teacher, where we discussed the different approaches to composing. In this day and age, composing has been made a lot easier thanks to notation programs such as Finale and Sibelius. However, writing with only a piano, pencil and paper at your disposal creates an entirely different atmosphere and way of thinking. It requires you to think much harder before writing something down, whereas with software, it’s easy to fall into the traps of copy-pasting and trial and error methods.

This work is, thus, the writing process of a composer put into sound.

Get the sheet music here.

Recording by the Desguin quartet.

Live performance by the Desguin quartet.