Blah Blah Blah

Blah Blah Blah is a ten-minute string quartet written in my first year at Berkeley and premiered by the Eco Ensemble in February 2022. The title is what is left of speech when you stop listening to it — and the piece is about exactly that: the moment a voice becomes noise.

The four players are treated as four speakers at a table who have long since stopped hearing one another. Each has a small repertoire of verbal gestures — a rising question in harmonics, a flat statement on the open strings, a nervous tremolo of agreement, a long bowed sigh — and each repeats them, with small variations, whether or not anyone is replying. Gradually the material is flattened: pitch turns to bow noise, rhythm to a kind of chattering col legno, and the quartet ends up producing a single, rather beautiful, texture of pure talk in which nothing at all is being said.

There is a joke in it, but the joke has a cold centre. It was written as a woman in rooms where people spoke a great deal and heard very little, and it is dedicated to everyone who has ever nodded along.