Intercepting a Shivery Light

Marcos Balter

2012

Saxophone quartet (soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone)

Commissioned by Chamber Music America, and premiered by the Anubis Quartet, Intercepting a Shivery Light (2011) dissolves all four musicians into a single quasi-electronic texture built upon auditory illusions. Much of its perceived linear gestures, microtonality, and polyphonic expansions and contractions are absent from the score; they only exist as aural entities that emerge from the written material, like a hidden aural dimension that only reveals itself when the work is played and heard. The title is both an allusion to the sonic image created by the work and an anagram related to the trigger of the main idea: the line "there are two colors in my head," from the lyrics of Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place.