Edan Love: 'Irksome, Murksome' for double bass quartet

About the Composition

'Irksome, Murksome’ is a piece that embodies contrast, and finds unity in dissimilarity. It’s a work whose onset evokes a lurking ominousness, emerging with a harsh drone that reveals a biting, angsty texture of frenetic plucking, angrily interrupted in its momentum by the harsh snappings of Bartok pizzicatos. The texture dissolves until it gives way to a dancing middle section, but finds unity by bridging these two different soundscapes through re-contextualization, borrowing atonal motifs from the opening and warping and transfiguring them, until they come out the other side with a new identity of tonality. What began as raucous, offensive, has now become elegant, refined.

This is the essence of 'Irksome, Murksome,' two words that could not mean more different things, and yet rhyme, associating with each other even if they aren’t presumed to. The piece cascades to that familiar restlessness, through its journey that restlessness having also been transfigured, its final minute collapsing into swarms of increasingly agitated figures until it gives way to a new droning ambience, fading into itself, and itself into nothingness.

This piece was written in collaboration with the lovely Mr. Paul Sharpe and his student quartets of the UNCSA double bass studio.

About the Composer

A lover of music spanning many genres, Edan Love’s increasing contributions to the 21st century classical literature are a vibrant vista of colliding quirks and styles that draw from each corner of his influences, combining the structured elegance of classical forms, the intimacy and rural primitivism of Appalachia with the folk scene his hometown of Asheville, NC offers, as well as the laissez-faire attitudes of rock n’ rollers that ushered in his love for music itself. But spanning across these multi-faceted influences, there is a lushness and regality in his music that has been described as a modern ‘hyper romantic' fashion of writing. His music invites you to experience a style that bridges aesthetic boundaries and brings forth a narrative and playfulness to it that listeners cannot help but be swept into.

Edan has studied with Ivan Seng, pianist, Gaelyn Hutchinson, composition, Harry Jacobson, double bass, Zach Page, electric bass, and is currently being mentored by Dr. Jared Miller, composition, and studying composition at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Edan’s most recent performance of his work was his solo piano piece, “Memories of Murmurs,” commissioned and recorded by Dr. Dmitri Schteinberg of the UNCSA piano faculty.