String Quartet 2.5 (2017)
("Playing with Seeds")

Composer note

The anthropologist Paul Richards has spent over thirty years studying rice cultivation via shifting cultivation among the Mende-speaking population of the village of Mogbuama in Sierra Leone. Richards understands shifting cultivation as a system of improvisation that requires not only experience and intuition, but also knowledge of landscape, soil, weather, and at least 45 different rice varieties. Richards likens this form of improvisation to the musical, while also pointing out the difference between the safety net of the structured art performance context and a real-time, real-world practice in which false moves can result in hunger, debt, starvation, and death.

In this society, women are the principal investigators: cataloguing plant varietals, introducing new growing techniques, predicting and monitoring their impact on the environment, coping with contingencies, and serving as repositories of memory for outcomes. Seed experimentation by women on small plots —“playing with seeds”— has resulted in the emergence of new and hardier varieties of rice, and it is this practice that offers an analogy for how this string quartet operates. The music is “grown” from “seeds” that are developed into new “varietals” through trajectories of register, temporal flux (stretching/compressing), sudden reversals of apparent fortune, and the nomadism that is central to shifting cultivation.

I want to suggest that, like all listening, an engagement with this work constitutes a form of nomadic improvisation--not by the performers, who are dealing with fully notated music—but on the part of audiences. In Mogbuaman society, farming sites belong to “ the living, the dead, and the yet unborn.” That’s actually quite a fine situation for a piece of music.

This quartet was written for the Mivos Quartet, with great appreciation for their brilliance.

— George Lewis

Paul Richards, “Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 365-382 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Featured on Mivos Quartet Album: May Our Centers Hold, available on bandcamp.