Bergamot Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Abby Fisher, Alyssa Wang, Kiyoshi Hayashi, Beste Tiknaz Modiri, Jacques Lee Wood - Robert Honstein: Horizon Line (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Continuous Interior: I. Flickering, Light
02. Continuous Interior: II. Languid, Dreamy
03. Continuous Interior: III. Urgent, Breathless
04. The Great Marsh: I. Salt Hay
05. The Great Marsh: II. Mudflats
06. The Great Marsh: III. Seaside Sparrow
07. The Great Marsh: IV. Estuary
08. Arctic: I. Midnight Sun
09. Arctic: II. Polar Night

Spanning over a decade of creative work, the pieces on this album reflect my dual fascination with the string quartet and the concept of landscape. I have always been drawn to nature—not just as a source of wonder, but also as a place of fear, discomfort, and even irritation. Nature is a blank slate; it is a neutral space that nonetheless serves as a mirror to our own quest for meaning. This paradox lies at the heart of the “pastoral.” While the pastoral in art is often a byproduct of urban longing—a desire to escape man-made structures—in this collection, I search for a new understanding of the concept. Here, the pastoral becomes a psychological space, bound only by projections of our mind. In this paradigm, the Horizon Line represents the limit of our vision: the point where immediate surroundings meet the infinite, and the known meets the unknown. Whether drawn by the fluorescent ceiling of a sprawling warehouse or the frozen edge of the Arctic tundra, the horizon orients us, allowing us to situate ourselves within the landscapes we inhabit.

In Continuous Interior (2022), the metallic tones of the vibraphone blend with the flickering resonances of the quartet to evoke an “urban pastoral.” The vast, climate-controlled expanses of modern life—shopping malls, transit hubs, silent warehouses—engender a new kind of sublime. We feel the grotesque artificiality of these spaces, yet we are struck by a sense of awe as we lose ourselves in their immense scale.

Bergamot Quartet and Abby Fisher navigate the work’s pulsing contours with relentless precision, drawing out shifting lines and harmonies across synthetic landscapes. Here, the horizon is fixed and artificial, yet it still offers a strange and meditative allure.

With The Great Marsh, we arrive at a more traditional pastoral. Completed in 2016, the music adopts a lyricism reminiscent of early landscape painters, evoking the organic fragility of an estuarial ecosystem along Boston’s North Shore. Moving away from the metallic interiors of the previous work, this piece returns to nature as a source of poetic solace, stillness, and rejuvenation. Performed with elegance and power by Jacques Lee Wood, Alyssa Wang, Beste Tiknaz Modiri, and Kiyoshi Hayashi, the quartet sketches the marsh’s life cycle across four movements: the raucous energy of “Salt Hay,” the heavy stillness of “Mudflats,” the delicate song of the “Seaside Sparrow,” and the undulating power of the “Estuary.”

Finally, the album turns toward the extremes of the North. Inspired by the photography of Chris McCaw, Arctic pushes the pastoral sensibility to its breaking point. We leave the warm embrace of the marsh’s tidal waters and enter a vast, unyielding tundra defined by extremes of weather, exposure, and light. Fueled by the fearless Mivos Quartet, the relentless, bright energy of “Midnight Sun” stands in stark contrast to the bleak chill of “Polar Night.” Composed in 2013, this is the oldest work on the album and, in many ways, represents the beginning of my fascination with the string quartet. Here, the horizon becomes absolute—a sublimation of our identity into the vast, indifferent landscape.