Blue Dress for string quartet (2015) 10'
string quartet
Ethel
program note
Blue Dress for String Quartet
My love of American folk music blossomed in the 1980s when I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a big folk town with amazing musicians of all kinds. I started to play mountain dulcimer and accompanied myself singing. I picked up the bones, played folk guitar, and assisted an instrument builder in making psaltries. Many of my compositions reference folk songs – like Four Marys (for string quartet) and Cruel Sister (for string orchestra.) For the Bang on a Can All-Stars I wrote Steel Hammer (a deconstruction of the John Henry ballad), and Reeling (featuring Canadian mouth music.) In Blue Dress for String Quartet my folk roots come to the fore with fiddling licks, fragments of song, humming, and bows deep into the string. The work was inspired by a field recording of a woman singing “ pretty little girl with a blue dress on.”
— Julia Wolfe