Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (2026)
(For Brooklyn Rider)

All Appeared New is a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. The jumping-off point for it (and the source of the title) is the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne (1636/7–1674), whose words I’ve set many times in choral work; this is the first time I’m using them as an abstract framework for instrumental music. There is an automatic dramatic structure to a concerto: one person (or here, a small group) versus a larger group. The composer’s job is to figure out how to negotiate that imbalance.

The first movement, All Appeared New, imagines a child seeing sunlight for the first time:

All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. 

The string quartet introduces the idea of a solar flare: very high, very bright gestures, using the entire bow, seemingly disorganized and busy but hovering around a very simple progression of chords. The quartet “teaches” the orchestra these gestures, who amplify and echo them.

The second movement, Customs and Manners, reverses the process: the orchestra plays a plodding, dark, but, hopefully, alluring series of chords and the quartet emerges from it, luring it back into the original bright textures. The poet describes the fleeting thoughts of infancy being “[…] blotted out; and at last all the celestial, great, and stable treasures to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, as if they had never been.”

A series of very fast cadenzas ushers in the third movement, Lustre, responding to the lines:

His omnipresence is our ample territory or field of joys, a transparent temple of in finite lustre, a strong tower of defence, a castle of repose, a bulwark of security, a palace of delights, an immediate help, and a present refuge in the needful time of trouble […]

Here, the quartet and the orchestra trade phrases back and forth rapidly, with quickly-made and quickly-dissolved allegiances between soloists and smaller groups in the orchestra. The piece ends with a drawn-out image of almost impossibly bright music, ecstatic and intense.

– Nico Muhly