Daniel Nieberg JERICHO for string quartet скачать в хорошем качестве

Daniel Nieberg JERICHO for string quartet

Live performance October 12, 2025 St. Mark's Anglican Church, Arlington, Texas Mark Miller and Andres Bravo, violins; Ute Miller, viola; Laura Ospina, cello 1. Tones in the ether 2. Silk of my soul (2:23) 3. When the walls broke down (4:44) 4. A message to the damned (8:28) Composer, arranger, orchestrator and producer Daniel Nieberg is based in New York City. The inclusion of his short string quartet Jericho in our October 2025 program happened essentially by chance. Though a search for sheet music to a compelling arrangement of Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho by the Italian string quartet Archimia proved unsuccessful, among the results that came up was this compact four-movement piece by Nieberg that betrays the young creator’s affinity for music of the late Romantic period, in particular Gustav Mahler. (Nieberg also counts among his chief influences artists like Elliot Smith and bands Big Thief, Wilco, and Radiohead.) Like the composers of a century and a half ago whose music expressed a full pallet of intense emotions, Nieberg conceived Jericho in the aftermath of a painful episode in his personal life. While emphasizing the music is open to anyone’s interpretation, he writes: I had gone through a pretty intense heartbreak, and I wrote this piece…as a response to my pain at the time. At the piece's conception, I was really confronting my own tendency to…idealize my romantic partners, often being blinded by my own idea of them rather than seeing them for the person they actually are. I thought of the story of Jericho as an analogy for this tendency. In the story of Jericho, Joshua is set on a mission to capture the heavily fortified city of Jericho because it is promised to him by God. In a similar sense, I have been searching for my own Jericho, a perfect partner who is seemingly out of reach from my ordinary life. Someone who embodies the ineffable, transient beauty of the universe. Someone who can hear the same tones in the ether as me, someone whose soul is cut from the same silk as mine. Joshua is met with resistance when he sends his spies into the city, and begins a siege, sending his army to circle its walls for seven days before blowing the shofars (ram’s horn trumpets) and breaking the walls down. In my own romantic relationships, there is always a process of stripping down my partner's walls to get to know the person behind them. If I circle around those walls for too long, I am living in the illusion I create for what lies beyond. This hurts the other person and myself, because I am not seeing them as they are, and I am hurting myself for loving a fabrication. Once those walls are truly broken and the illusion is gone, the relationship is doomed because I choose to chase the ideal rather than the person. In Joshua's case, his army kills everyone in the city, dooming the very thing that he desired in the first place. The last movement of my piece, "A message to the damned," is an attempt to reconcile my feelings of having hurt others and myself in the past. It maneuvers through different layers of grief, gradually lifting them away, like shedding off dead skin. It ends in a state of bittersweet acceptance; acceptance for what has happened, acceptance for who I've become. We all have our Jerichos in life, ideals that have to be debunked in order to see the world as it really is. That process can be painful, but what lies beyond the walls is much deeper and richer than what we may think it to be.