as body as vessel - the voyager (2025)

for string quartet

 
 
 

Description


This string quartet draws inspiration from the epic migrations of the Polynesian people—voyagers who, guided only by stars, winds, and embodied knowledge, crossed vast and uncertain oceans in search of a place to belong. However, the work does not aim to recount these journeys; rather, it listens to them, drifts with them, and ultimately departs from them to ask a more intimate question: Why have we arrived in this body, in this time, in this world?

The body is a vessel—fragile, decaying, marked by the journey. Yet it carries us. Through motion and sound, it remembers what the mind cannot grasp. Music, for me, is not a destination. It is a means of practice, a form of Dharma. It is the boat I use to cross this world—one I cherish, and one I am ready to let go. In this work, the quartet becomes that vessel. It breathes, trembles, dissolves; it is a meditation on impermanence, movement, and presence. A voyager not toward elsewhere, but toward understanding.

More Information

Title: As Body As Vessel - The Voyager

Year of composition: 2025

Duration: 20

Instrumentation: violin, violin, viola, violincello

Performance History:

  • Not yet premiered.

 

The Sea

I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from the sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air


ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young person,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)