Instrumentation:
2 violins
viola
cello
Duration:
around 19 minutes
Premiere:
October 10, 2025 – Portland, OR
@ The Hallowed Halls,
Casey Bozell and Jenny Estrin, violin
Amy Roesler, viola
Dylan Rieck, cello
If you’d like to purchase a pdf version of the score and parts for Tamaki 環季 The Cycle of Seasons, drop me a line. Cost: $15
Tamaki 環季 The Cycle of Seasons is the third piece in the series collected in the album Daughter, we will name you.
The piece is a single-movement fantasia for string quartet. It’s divided into fifteen short sections, all played attacca:
- Introduction
- Early Spring
- Hanami*
- Summer Begins
- The Desperate Need to Get Outside**
- Midsummer
- Autumn
- Waking to Snow
- Winter
- Solstice
- There are seasons for the planets in their orbits,
- the bright galaxies,
- the death and birth of stars,
- and everything that lives.
- Conclusion
* Hanami (花見 in Japanese, lit. “flower viewing”) is the Japanese tradition of enjoying the transience of flowers, particularly the blooming of cherry blossoms from late March to early May, depending on the year and latitude.
** This is the summer FOMO experienced by all Pacific Northwesterners at the first hint of sunlight in late spring. The feeling usually arrives early in the year and holds on until the winter downpours make camping trips unpalatable.
Timestamps for where the sections appear in the recording
Background
In 2014 and 2019 I wrote the pieces Amane and Morika for my friends’ first two daughters. When a third sister appeared on the scene, the instruction didn’t even need to be given to write a third piece.
As with the other pieces in the series, I was starting with a title, a little human being’s name, and using that as the basis of a theme or anthem for her. I don’t think of the pieces in Daughter, we will name you as portraits, profiles, or prognostications. I am not playing the role of prophet or psychologist for Tamaki; I’m more a tailor, stitching together a piece of clothing I think will fit, and she can choose whether or not to wear it.
I started writing in the summer of 2023. I knew from the beginning that this would be a string quartet piece. There isn’t a clear conscious explanation for this, other than that I was thinking back on how much I enjoyed writing and realizing The Root Takes Hold and wanted to work with the same palette again. I also had a subtle sense that the material wanted to be played on strings.
Because Tamaki 環季 means “the cycle of seasons” in Japanese, I found myself in a ready-made musical tradition. I was expecting the piece to take shape along those lines, but I wanted to keep my mind open as the ideas took shape. To my surprise, what emerged first wasn’t a depiction of a season. Instead, I was hearing a lullaby-like melody I knew would be the piece’s theme, the Tamaki motif. It’s not a sleepy lullaby – it wants to go places – so limiting it to a simple 4-step tour of the seasons wouldn’t be enough. I came up with a single-movement fantasia that explores a diverse series of seasonal and mid-seasonal changes as small vignettes, variations on a theme. After going through the cycle of the year, the theme launches out, briefly, to explore larger cycles of cosmic growth and decay. Tamaki is very curious and wants to see the big picture. It ends with a conclusion that mirrors the introduction and then brings everything to a point of stillness.
This wasn’t my conscious goal, but that pattern gives the piece a classic sonata form, with an introduction; a varied, rondo-like exposition; a tense development; and a soothing recapitulation. It feels like a little symphony to me, or at least a first movement.
The piece is more complex and at some points tumultuous than I was expecting it to be, especially considering that the piece is an anthem for a young girl just learning about the world. But I don’t see that as a flaw – life is complex, and there is tumult, adventure, and conflict, and I think it’s a great gift to be aware of that and a virtue to reflect that awareness in one’s attitude and choices. I have confidence that someday (if she hasn’t already) Tamaki will get to peep that big-picture vision and grow into her complexity.