Daily Download: "Wait," Aaron Siegel, live performance

I've mostly known Aaron Siegel as an exceptionally sensitive and subtle experimental music drummer and a member of the beautiful improvising trio Memorize the Sky. It turns out he's also studying composition at new music hot spot Wesleyan University, one of a growing number of artists exploring both new classical and experimental/improvisational music, and often making the line between them very blurry indeed. This is a string quartet Siegel wrote last fall, as performed by the superb Flux Quartet, fast becoming the preeminent interpreters of new string quartet music. The piece is a study in glissandi in three continuous sections, first bowed, then pizzicato, then bowed again, but at a glacial tempo. "I wasn't going after any kind of grand narrative journey or anything like that," Siegel told me by e-mail. "I am generally more gripped by the minutiae of stagnancy."
Free Download: "Wait"