The music, with its dream of paradise, seems to dissolve into mist, with the Terra String Quartet playing on the edge of silence…

Hear the music

Very special: a visual animation of the piece, by Stephen Malinowski. You can see each note, as well as hear it. And Stephen found a way to make the surrounding hush visible.

This is the second track of my recording on the Acis label, Greg Sandow: Three Quartets.

From the CD liner notes:

Like Quartet for Anne, The Remembered Song is close to my heart, but in a different way. It meditates on a passage from a spiritual book that’s meant a lot to me, A Course in Miracles:

Listen —perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything particular. But you remember, from just this little part, how lovely was the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you loved those who were there and listened with you.

You could take that as a vision of a heaven we all come from, and where we’ll all return. Or it could just be a dream, of a paradise we long for.

My hardest task, in writing this, was to compose the melody, which, in its sound and feeling, has to sustain the meaning of the piece. At the start, we hear it just in fragments, as if we’re asleep, dreaming of something we can’t quite remember.

Something new then sounds in the music, and we wake up. We stretch, we walk. Gaining energy, we run, and we dance. The musicians tap on their instruments, giving the music a beat, a rhythmic spark.

Next come violent episodes, evoking war and mourning. When we recover, banishing the darkness, we take a walk in a park. We come home. We grow drowsy. We fall asleep, and, as if in another dream, we hear the song complete.

The musicians tap lightly, dancing while the melody sings. A quiet descant floats above. And then we vanish in the dream.