String Quartet no. 1
Op. 21 (2023)

It took a very long time to finally finish this piece. I was studying under Robert Gibson at the University of Maryland and had been wanting to tackle the genre of string quartet for some time. A handful of important Twentieth-century efforts were in my head and gave me a sense of direction for it. The construction of the piece is very tight, and is meant to be rather crammed-full of information. The first three movements were completed at Maryland in 2018, but it took five years to finally finish the last two movements. For some reason the fourth movement just could not offer me any solutions. Something about the notion of a "slow movement" in the piece just felt insincere. Eventually I managed to figure it out, but it was a long process of coming back to it every couple of months to see whether there was indeed light at the end of the tunnel.