Spring Rhythm was inspired by two disparate sources: the Medieval Motet and the famous "spatter" paintings of Jackson Pollock. The textures of Pollock's paintings seem highly musical to me; it is not hard to imagine the beautiful musical textures we might create if we were to treat his paintings as "scores." I am impressed by the physicality of his paintings; they convey a sense of gravity and effort. In constructing the textures of Spring Rhythm, I imagined how Pollock must have felt working on, for instance, Autumn Rhythm (after which my piece is named). After "spattering" an initial texture, I iterated it, and with each iteration, I would subtract one or more of the parts, replacing them with new parts and attempting to do alone what generations of Medieval composers might have done with a single motet. Over the course of many iterations, the original texture (or Motet) gradually changed into something entirely different--the sense of the original, however, always remained, if becoming ever more distant...
As performed by the Brentano Quartet: