Aidan Vass & Quartet Aido: An Evening of Chamber Music

Community Music is a piece that requires each player to distribute the leadership responsibility amongst themselves. Every gesture is mutually agreed on before it proceeds.

Sequoia, like much of my other music, ponders the idea of how we represent shape and contour in music. Sequoia trees balance two perspectives - one can look up to the top of the tree and see a towering, formidable sight, or enter the spaces in between the roots of the tree, and find a space that feels super intimate. These feelings come from our perspective of contour in nature and offer a fascinating angle to explore in music.

Piano Sonata took on a lot of different faces as the writing process took place. There were a lot of very fundamental ideas I wanted to stretch out really far - things like space, contour, melody. I wanted to create a set of works that each try to push some parameter to its extreme. But as the work progressed, I was continually drawn to the idea of musical axes, not just as compositional devices, but as a means of representing a "mirror-like" quality that allowed me to look into my own life and see how these fundamental parameters seem to derive from people and experiences in my life.

Andante and Allegretto aim to push the envelope of space as much as possible. The subtraction-gesture in the opening and throughout the rest feels to me like a doorway into the space between the notes, unlocking a sort of "inverted" melody. At the climax of Andante, the sonorities of the movement collide, emulating this notion of compressing the previously explored space. Allegretto serves as a contrast point for Andante. Rather than exploring the space, Allegretto defines a rigid space at the start and refuses to deviate.

Largo and Presto push a different envelope forward. Largo is a very personal piece to me, and the only piece in the set to really derive around a florid melody. This melodic content for me pushes the work into a more introspective state, and Presto follows this up with a realized mirror. In Presto, the notion of an axis is slowly developed more and more up until the ending, where the axis around E and Eb is fully exploded, and the mirror-like introspection comes to a conclusion.

String Quartet (2025) covers a wide range of introspection on the subject of love.

I.

The first movement, Invocation to St. Maximilian Kolbe, recalls the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe and his self-sacrifice at Auschwitz in 1941, during which he gave his life to set a man free to return to his family - a true act of sacrificing the self for the good of the other.

II.

The second movement is loosely based on the painting of the same name by van Gogh, in which a child is seen yearning for her father's arms.

III.

In Grace, a steady stream of pulse overcomes the quartet. This movement is palindromic and serves as the thematic entry point into the work as a whole.

IV.

Over the Town is loosely based on the painting of the same name by Marc Chagall, in which the painter and his wife are seen soaring over their hometown.

V.

Revocation of Grace is a reflection on acts of hate and malice, those acts in which the other is sacrificed for the self.