Alex Shapiro, composer: Introspect

Introspect

(String Quartet).
Total duration ca. 7 minutes (2000)
Published by Activist Music (ASCAP).
One movement work. 7 pages, 8.5" x 11".

Premiered on December 10, 2000 in Los Angeles, CA.
by Daphne Chen and Melissa Reiner, violins;
Alma Fernandez, viola and Adam Esbensen, cello.

Audio clip performed in a live concert at the Vashon Chamber Music Festival, May 2011, by the Odeon Quartet: by Gennady Filimonov and Artur Girsky, violins; Heather Bentley, viola and Rowena Hammill, cello.

"...The program opened with the disarming elegance of Alex Shapiro's Introspect. The composer evoked a luminous, impressionistic sound world that belied the sparse medium of [four] string instruments."

---— Keith Paulson-Thorp, ComposerUSA

View page one of the score
Listen to audio clips of this piece	1.
	2.
Purchase this score Score and parts available from Activist Music for $30.00.

Introspect was written at the end of a year that brought some welcome self reflection regarding loss and the persistence of hope, and I think that this music surveys some of that private emotional terrain. Beginning in relative stillness, the piece unfolds with solemn tones that lead to lyrical interchanges between grief, melancholy, and shades of promise. Elegiac in many ways, there is something left unanswered in the music that balances precariously between deep sorrow, resolute acceptance, and uneasy calm.