Bradbury Studies

PROGRAM NOTE

Bradbury Studies is a loving deconstruction of the song “Bradbury (304 Broadway)” from my 2014 album, The Ambassador. The "Bradbury" of both titles refers to the iconic and sui generis fin-de-siècle building in downtown LA, which is prominently featured in the 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, a film whose plot, setting, and characters provided great inspiration for the original song. In the string quartet adaptation, shards of motivic material from the song are scattered widely and wildly as the tune struggles to announce itself amidst the chaos. While the sound world is quite varied, drawing on extended string techniques and other contemporary vocabulary, the spirit of the work comes straight from Schubert and Mahler: that is to say, it attempts to continue the tradition, evoked so frequently by those two composers, of a fluid exchange of ideas between instrumental and vocal works. Likewise, Bradbury Studies derives its materials from an extant song. In the piece, after several false starts and abandoned pathways, the plaintive melody and original song finally burst through the texture in their original form, albeit with the first violin taking the place of the voice, before a coda of new material intrudes to bring the work to its conclusion.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2014

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