While earlier recordings by the Georgia Guitar Quartet contain a small number of original compositions, including some improvisatory passages, Puzzle features all-original compositions by the group, including works by individual members as well as pieces conceived by the group as a whole. The project fully engages the group’s collective propensity to explore new textures, colors, and forms. In many ways, Puzzle is an outgrowth and extension of the quartet’s previous release, Mosaic (2004), which contains one set of original pieces as well as new arrangements of music from the late-Romantic and twentieth-century repertory. The experimental middle section of Mosaic’s closing track, The Road to Lisdoonvarna (reprise), paves the way for the diverse sonic vocabulary and emergent musical environment of Puzzle.
PRELUDE
Puzzle opens with an impromptu Prelude . Although totally unplanned and spontaneous, this brief introductory piece assumes a noticeable form -- its shape is defined by texture and dynamics, with melodic ideas attempting to materialize but remaining occluded.
FLIGHT
Following the dissipation of the opening Prelude , Kyle Dawkins' Flight initiates the quasi-tonal, minimalist atmosphere that will pervade much of the album. Textural and percussive elements continue to play an important role in sculpting the soundscape of this album: the coda of Flight recapitulates the shape and texture of the Prelude , albeit in temporal diminution.
PIECES 1-4
Fragmented from a larger work by Jason Solomon entitled Puzzle , the four Pieces interspersed throughout the CD function as interludes that bind together the album as a whole. This composition is a synthesis of serialist and minimalist techniques. It is likewise a large-scale transformational process conceived almost entirely in the pre-compositional planning stages of its formation. The work features four seemingly disparate motives -- each with a distinct melodic contour, rhythmic profile, and total duration -- but each related through the operations of transposition, retrograde, and/or inversion. The four different parts repeat incessantly while undergoing gradual and systematic permutation until they eventually merge into the same melodic shape. Since Puzzle is broken up into four different "pieces," the last serving as the disc's concluding track, the processual "solving of the musical puzzle" occupies the entire album.
PAN
Pan is a structured improvisation designed by all four members of the quartet. A skeletal form featuring key musical moments was established at the outset, but the musical pathways connecting these moments and fleshing out the form unfolded freely during the recording session. Themes from other works on the CD are woven throughout Pan , and some recycled thematic material from Mosaic makes an appearance. The derivation of the work's title is twofold: First, the work is "pandiatonic," meaning it takes the seven pitches of the C-major diatonic scale as its source material; however, this pitch collection is employed in a non-tonal manner, and tertian harmonies and functional chord progressions are suppressed. Second, the spatial process of "panning" through the ensemble space concludes the work.
MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE
Solomon's Middle of Somewhere is something of a one-way trip, a musical journey that starts and ends in two completely different places. The transition between these two points, however, is continuous, the musical landscape changing very slowly during the journey. Middle of Somewhere is divided into 6 sections (discrete locations in the journey); however, these sections overlap and meld into one another, lending a sense of seamless transformation to the progress of the music. Commencing with silence punctuated by noise, the piece ultimately concludes in more familiar musical terrain.
The piece also involves the idea of four distinct individuals traveling into the unknown together. Throughout the course of the music, four players go from playing similar material in a seemingly non-cohesive manner to performing as a coordinated and unified ensemble. To this end, the music itself goes from being aleatoric and highly improvisational to being strictly determined and notated. The piece was actually composed backward by section, and the ensemble learned the work in reverse order, allowing musical themes and motives to undergo a type of "pre-development" before they were presented in their original form in the final section. This compositional approach provides several "musical arrows" which point toward the final destination, helping to guide the listener along the way. These arrows may be evident to the listener only in retrospect, however; after the journey has ended and we find ourselves in the middle of somewhere.
LA VAGUE
The appearance of the cello at the end of Middle of Somewhere forecasts the unorthodox instrumentation of La Vague , another work by Kyle Dawkins. With Phil Snyder returning to the cello and Dawkins trading his guitar for a banjo, the composite musical texture reaches its farthest point of departure during the four-movement plan of this work. The closing movement is a truncated reiteration of the first, and these outer movements encapsulate a monophonic cello solo, an atmospheric study in stasis, and the moto perpetuo third movement that dissolves into an altered restatement of the lone melody previously rendered by the cello. Dawkins' unique musical language -- first exposited in Flight -- enables his two compositions to cohesively bookend the interior contents of the album, while themselves being sandwiched by the opening Prelude and the concluding Piece four .
