The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary defines par­si­mo­ny as ​“the care­ful or spar­ing use of mon­ey or oth­er mate­r­i­al resources; econ­o­my; thrifti­ness; fru­gal­i­ty.” In the con­text of music the­o­ry, the word has come to describe a kind of max­i­mal­ly smooth trans­for­ma­tion of one tri­ad into anoth­er, where­in a sin­gle pitch with­in a tri­ad moves by step to pro­duce anoth­er. In sci­en­tif­ic dis­course, the prin­ci­pal of par­si­mo­ny holds that the most accept­able expla­na­tion for a phe­nom­e­non is the sim­plest. The Oxford Ref­er­ence Dic­tio­nary explains that ​“in phy­lo­ge­net­ics, for exam­ple, the pre­ferred tree show­ing evo­lu­tion­ary rela­tion­ships between species, mol­e­cules, or oth­er enti­ties is the one that requires the least amount of evo­lu­tion­ary change, that is, max­i­mum parsimony.”

In this piece, the string quar­tet forges a path through a dense­ly micro­ton­al field of chords. They move slow­ly and with great effort. They are dra­mat­ic and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic. They work cau­tious­ly to elab­o­rate a thought. The piece’s har­monies grew sto­chas­ti­cal­ly, with a strong attrac­tion towards par­si­mo­nious trans­for­ma­tions of one sonor­i­ty to anoth­er. In this con­text, the quar­tet asks: How is that such econ­o­my of motion might refract into some­thing flam­boy­ant­ly, per­haps taste­less­ly, expressive?