Gilding the Fourfold

Gilding the Fourfold is a seven-minute chamber work for soprano saxophone and just intonation piano, the composer’s first to bring the tuning system into an acoustic chamber setting. It uses an original twelve-note fixed scale derived from elements of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano and Michael Harrison’s Revelation, with further modifications, producing a diatonic minor flavour shot through with septimal intervals. The piece was commissioned by saxophonist Evan Ney, who relearned his fingerings to navigate the scale and has since continued to champion the work.

Program Note

The piece carries a private dedication. My friend Nile Lok — a philosopher whose work centres on Martin Heidegger — was with me during the last conversation I had with my grandfather before he passed in 2024. We spoke about the meaning of art and life itself, a subject that ran through both relationships, and Heidegger’s concept of the Fourfold surfaced more than once. It names what we lose to technological development, and insists that we must dwell within our living spaces with renewed attention. My grandfather’s spaces were always chaotic — full of tools and old things without clear purposes, organised in a way only he understood. I remember his trailer, the dust, the bread machine running, the smell of cigars.

In Gilding the Fourfold, the performer is forced to re-dwell within their instrument and the material itself, since the unfamiliar tuning system requires a restructuring of well-trodden technique. What sounds easy is deceptively difficult; what appears challenging can be deceptively simple.