Bubble Chamber (2025)

Composer note

Bubble Chamber was commissioned by New Century Chamber Orchestra, under the artistic leadership of violinist Daniel Hope, in celebration of the legacy of San Francisco composer and philanthropist Gordon Getty. Since the impetus for the piece was festive – a toast! – I got to thinking about the sinuous trails of bubbles in a glass of Champagne. Those bubbles appear out of nowhere and move fast, at regular intervals, along shifting, crisscrossing trajectories. There are some obvious musical parallels: the style known as perpetual motion, characterized by a rapid and continuous stream of notes; and of course, counterpoint with, in this case, a distinct emphasis on the points themselves: tiny bubbles...

A web of dotted lines in fluid relationships seemed a natural fit for New Century’s trademark sound, which I would describe as maximalist chamber music. New Century is an orchestra that behaves like a string quartet, and that is a rare and wonderful thing, requiring extraordinary skill and a level of individual engagement with the material that just isn’t possible with a conductor in the mix. I have been enchanted by New Century since its founding and had the chance to hear them last season, playing Strauss’s Metamorphosen, a piece for 23 solo string players, the epitome of the maximalist chamber music aesthetic! It was with that rich texture in my ears and the image of a glass of bubbly in my mind’s eye that I started Bubble Chamber in the spring of 2025.

The title might describe any container filled with fizzy liquid, but also refers to a device invented by Berkeley physicist Donald Glaser that allows for the detection of sub-atomic particles by way of the trails of bubbles they trace through a superheated fluid. I was introduced to Dr. Glaser and his revolutionary invention by, of all people, a pair of violinists (Peter Cropper and Ronald Birks) via a piece I had written for their string quartet (The Lindsays), so all this bubble business in the context of chamber music was beginning to circle back and resonate in unanticipated ways. Pete and Ronnie were dear friends whose playing – unmistakably individual yet uncannily in synch – changed my experience of music, and especially of chamber music, forever. We also drank a lot of wine together, some of it with physicists, some of it sparkling, though I might be losing the thread here. Music, with its digressions and returns, tends toward the elliptical, which I suppose might also be said of physics. Dr. Glaser, himself a violinist, was rumored to have come up with the idea for the bubble chamber while contemplating a glass of beer, which he flatly denied.

Maybe it was Champagne…

— Nathaniel Stookey