STEPHEN ANDREW TAYLOR Stephen Andrew Taylor grew up playing horn in downstate Illinois, and he studied composition with William Karlins and Alan Stout at Northwestern University. He later studied at the California Institute of the Arts and at Cornell University, working closely with Steven Stucky. His music often explores boundaries between art and science: Unapproachable Light, inspired by images from the Hubble space telescope and the Bible, was commissioned and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1996. More recent works include Seven Microworlds for flute, guitar, and electronics, premiered in November 2000 in Toronto; Pulse Aria for viola and electronics, performed in April 2001 at the International Viola Congress in New Zealand; and Viriditas for flute, viola, and harp, premiered in July 2001 at the Mozart Festival in San Luis Obispo, California. Taylor teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The composer comments: Quark Shadows is my fanciful name for the trails left by quarks—among the smallest particles known to exist—in atom-smashing experiments. The darting, swirling lines in the first movement are a sort of aural realization of these trails. But shadows also suggest darkness and our ancient, supernatural beliefs and fears. My quartet (horn, viola, double bass, and piano, “prepared” with rubber muting in its low register) tries to capture the excitement and trepidation I feel at the frontiers of bright, rational science and murky, instinctive human nature. The second movement, Symmetry Breaking, is inspired by the birth of my daughter; to me, the beginning of a new life is like a little scientific miracle. The horn plays a fanfare, based on the natural overtone series, into the resonating strings of the piano. The title, again from modern physics, refers not to violence but the freeing of stasis: a crystal, perfectly symmetrical, can never be alive. Only when symmetry is broken can something new come into the world; scientists in fact use this concept to describe the first moments of the universe. Quark Shadows was commissioned for the Chicago Symphony by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund. The first movement is dedicated to Augusta Read Thomas; the second to Hua Nian and Olivia Nian Taylor. << back to musicNOW home