The Eclipse Quartet: Hollow Flame

The Eclipse Quartet returns to HMC with a concert that includes world premieres from Bill Alves and Boston-based composer Howard Frazin and West Coast premieres of two quartets by Los Angeles-based composer Akshaya Avril Tucker.

Sara Parkins and Sarah Thornblade, violins
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maggie Parkins, cello

Sunday, March 30, 2025, 7 p.m.
Drinkward Recital Hall

Clockwise from top left: Sara Parkins, Maggie Parkins, Alma Lisa Fernandez, Sarah Thornblade. Photo courtesy of the Eclipse Quartet.







all ashore
This is a piece about reuniting through tumult, patience, and celebration. I think this work can be Eclipse’s call for action, a call for healing, and a call to come together. (SG)

Hollow Flame 
This piece was created for Brooklyn Rider’s project,” The Four Elements” (2022) in which selected works allude to earth, air, fire and water. Hollow Flame meditates on fire. The quartet is like a journal entry of moments recorded over many months- grappling with California fires-the loss of so much, from ancient, old growth forests to human lives, let alone human health and the well being of our ecosystems. (AAT)

Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
As an English major first starting to compose in my early 20s, I couldn't quite understand why anyone would want to set words to music and ruin a perfectly good poem. Later working with opera composer Dominick Argento, he instilled in me an understanding that setting words is less about the words themselves and more about one's point of view the experience those words evoke. Again, strangely considering how much vocal music I've written, I prefer abstract music without words generally. To me words make the musical experience less direct. At the same time there is something about composing vocal music that helps a composer create abstract materials and dramatic structures with real, expressive, and dramatic clarity. 

Over the past 15 years or so I started wondering what would happen if I reconsidered some of my vocal music from an abstract perspective. This new string quartet is one of those reworkings. Three of the movements are based on songs from my Donald Hall song cycle Letting Go written in 2017: I. Fall, a reworking of The Wish (a poem written about past trauma and imagined letting go); II. Winter, a reworking of The Child (about unknowing); IV. Summer, a reworking of White Apples (about the present moving forward and a letting go in earnest).  In between Winter and Summer is III. Spring. Spring was written in 2011, several years before the other three movements, as a musical portrait of a person’s life. The four movements are put together to form an expressive arc of sorts, moving from an uncertain darkness to a more reflective sense of possibility. (HF)

In Whose Mouth, the Stars
The story goes that when Krishna, the legendary incarnation of Lord Vishnu, was a child, he once was caught eating sand. Concerned, his mother Yashoda scolded him and pried his mouth open. There, instead of dirt, she beheld the entire universe and beyond, with all its galaxies, with every element of the earth, the weather, the human mind and its senses, her own village and she, herself.

This piece was inspired by that fascinating moment, told in the Bhagavata Purana. I imagined it through, in different melodic placements of Raag Charukeshi–a raag that holds longing, tension, transcendence–with help from the wonderful variety of timbres and ranges that string instruments produce. My goal in retelling this story, sonically, involved manipulation of sound “perspective”, the extremes of near and far– holding both illusion and imagination. I wanted to play that narrative game, Krishna’s lila, showing how small our conflicts really are, in the grand scheme of the Universe:even smaller than sand. (AAT)

Wild Geometry
Some of the 16 strings of this ensemble are tuned to pitches not found on the piano but present in the natural harmonics of the strings. I hope the listener will experience the sounds from this canonical ensemble in unfamiliar but refreshing ways, what poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor called “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.” The naturalist John Muir may have had this Romantic ideal in mind when he described the highlands of Scotland: “The ordinary sensations which mountains arouse do not fit these extraordinary rock shapes and yet they are not terrifying in any way, but merely strange....The movement of wild mountain scenery is generally a tossing movement as of waves...the summits of which rise out of these billows like rocks out of a sea and seem to belong to a different order. They are bold and regular and yet unexpected in their shape, as if they were the result of a wild kind of geometry.”  (BA)

Sarah Gibson was a Los Angeles based composer and pianist whose works draw on her breadth of experience as a collaborative performer. Her compositions reflect her deep interest in the creative process across various artistic mediums—especially from the female perspective. She received a Copland House Residency and commissions from the League of American Orchestras and the Toulmin Foundation, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Summer Music Festival & School, Grossman Ensemble, and Seattle Symphony, among others. Gibson was co-founder of the new music piano duo, HOCKET, which has been lauded as "brilliant" by the LA Times' Mark Swed, and was a core artist for the inimitable Los Angeles Series, Piano Spheres. She was Assistant Director for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship Program and was Assistant Professor in Composition/Theory at the California State University, Long Beach Bob Cole Conservatory of Music.

The music of Howard Frazin has been called “genuinely touching” by the Dallas Morning News and “clear in design…ingeniously scored…[with] an almost unbearable poignancy” by The Boston Globe. His works are commissioned and performed by many leading ensembles including A Far Cry, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, Boston Classical Orchestra, Claremont Trio, Florestan Recital Project, Lorelei Ensemble, Lydian String Quartet, and Triple Helix, and programmed at festivals including Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Rockport, Monadnock, Bowdoin, Kneisel Hall, and Yellow Barn. His works are published by Edition Peters and recorded on Ravello Records and MSR Classics.

Frazin’s oratorio The Voice of Isaac—a retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story from Isaac’s perspective—was commissioned by PALS Children’s Chorus and premiered at Boston’s Jordan Hall in 2003, and recently revised and performed by Coro Allegro at Sanders Theatre. Orchestral works include Of Echoes and Dreamspremiered in 2018 by Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra; In the Forests of the Night, commissioned and premiered by the Boston Classical Orchestra, with subsequent performances by multiple orchestras across the United States, including Pro Arte in 2017. Other recent projects include a viola concerto for the Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms Society featuring internationally-renowned soloist Kim Kashkashian, a song cycle, Letting Go, in collaboration with the late U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall and premiered by baritone Keith Phares, and a string quartet for Boston’s Arneis Quartet. Upcoming 2020 commissioned projects include a new piano sonata for Jonathan Bass to be premiered on the Walden Chamber Players concert series, and a new work for guitarist Eliot Fisk, violinist James Buswell, and cellist Carol Ou commissioned by Music for Peace. Frazin is co-founder and artistic director of WordSong and has taught composition at the New England Conservatory and the Longy School of Music. He was a composition student of Dominick Argento.

Akshaya Avril Tucker  is a composer who draws inspiration from the music and dance traditions of South Asia, having trained as a cellist and Odissi dancer from a young age. She explores meditative, gestural and effervescent soundscapes, especially in her works for strings. Her music has been performed by Brooklyn Rider, A Far Cry, members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Salastina Music Society, Duo Cortona, Third Coast Chamber Collective, Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak, and many others. Her recent commissions include works for Brooklyn Rider (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall), Carpe Diem String Quartet, and WindSync. In 2019, she won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Originally from Western Massachusetts, Tucker is currently based in Los Angeles where she is pursuing her doctorate in composition at the University of Southern California, studying with Ted Hearne, Nina Young, and Don Crockett. She holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Music from Brown University. She is an alumna from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (2017-2018), and a member of the second cohort of GLFCAM’s Composing Earth, in 2022-2023.

Bill Alves is a composer, writer, and video artist based in Southern California and engaged at the intersections of musical cultures and technology. He has written extensively for conventional acoustic instruments, non-Western instruments (especially Indonesian gamelan) and electronic media, often integrated with abstract animation. CDs of his audio works include The Terrain of Possibilities and Imbal-Imbalan, Mystic Canyon, and Guitars and Gamelan. His work with computer animation pioneer John Whitney inspired abstract computer animations with music, now released by the Kinetica Video Library as Celestial Dance. He is the co-author with Brett Campbell of the new biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick. He is also author of the book Music of the Peoples of the World, now in its third edition from Cengage/Schirmer. Other writings have appeared in Organised Sound, Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, SEAMUS Journal, 1/1, and elsewhere. In 1993-94 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellow in Indonesia, where he studied the gamelan orchestra music of Java and Bali. He currently directs the HMC American Gamelan, an ensemble of specially tuned Javanese instruments dedicated to the performance of new, non-traditional music. He often explores new musical tunings in his works and is one of the organizers of MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new music in alternate tunings. He is the Miller Professor of Humanities at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California.



HMC is deeply grateful for the generous support that created The Ken Stevens ’61 Founding Class Concert Series.