Ethernal Wait For No Answer

Ethernal Wait For No Answer — the misspelling is deliberate, a word that is half eternal and half ether — is a nine-minute quartet for bass flute, baritone saxophone, percussion and piano, written in 2021 for Ensemble Suono Giallo and premiered by them that July.

It is a piece about the particular duration of waiting for a reply that is not going to come: the message that stays on “read,” the door that stays closed. The two low winds share a single line and keep handing it back and forth as though each were checking that the other has received it; the piano sustains chords that do not resolve and lets them ring into the percussion’s bowed metals; the whole ensemble repeatedly assembles a phrase that seems about to become a question and then lets it fall. Time in the piece is elastic — long held tones, sudden nervous flurries, long held tones again — the way it is when you are watching a phone.

The ending offers no answer either. The ensemble simply thins out until one instrument is left, still waiting, still in the ether. The work was later taken up by the Argo Kollektiv, who performed it in the Kaisersaal in Vienna in February 2024.