Rand Steiger: String Quartets

Rand Steiger’s Introspective Trilogy is a series of string quartets with electronics composed over a period of eight years for the JACK Quartet. Reflecting on emotional states through musical expression, the quartets explore intense feelings of anger, frustration, and despair in response to alarming political developments in the U.S. and globally, from 2016 when the project began, to catastrophic recent developments. Steiger relates the resurgence of xenophobia and well-known elements of authoritarian rule to his own Jewish-European family history, which was marred by expulsion and extermination. In doing so, he significantly broadens the purely musical and aesthetic framework of his explorations of spatial sound.