Written for MoVE, Modern Violin Ensemble.
Try-out at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Thursday April 12, 2018 – 7:30 PM. Premiere NEW MUSIC DEPAUL Sat, April 14, 8pm DePaul University Concert Hall.

When imagining four violins in a closed space in my head, my immediate imagination drew a painting of similar colors freely and joyfully co-existing. And my inner ear heard the mysteriously rich and scrumptious dissimilar sounds. There, my musical intuition was to emphasize the minute differences by placing the same to similar sounds together. I imagine that the reward of such experience is to gradually learn to hear the progressively magnifying differing sounds- from what was initially the same sounds.

Truly in homogeneity, the uniqueness (otherness or singularity) of each instrument comes through due to the individual player’s un-imitatible and exclusive relationship to their own instruments. Who can imagine several violinists producing exactly the same sounding music from a same score?  The oxymoron of the simplicity (playing same to similar music) and complexity (the collective listening experience of these differing sounds) logically exists in my imagination.

In Mixtures II for Four Amplfied Violins, I attempt to create a space where the boundary between togetherness and individualness, and similarities and dissimilarity ebb-and flows.
Seung-Won Oh, March 2018