A Year of Music

I’ve had the following set of evocative descriptions of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets by Rachel Kiel sitting on my computer’s desktop in a sticky since sometime in 2006, after reading it on Alex Ross’s blog:

The First Quartet is a blade of grass,
the Second Quartet is a pocket knife,
the Third Quartet is a captive bird,
the Fourth Quartet is an old train car,
the Fifth Quartet is a piece of blue glass,
the Sixth Quartet is a worn dress,
the Seventh Quartet is a red crayon,
the Eighth Quartet is a forest fire,
the Ninth Quartet is a paper fan,
the Tenth Quartet is the bottom of the ocean,
the Eleventh Quartet is a bullet,
the Twelfth Quartet is a sleeping lover,
the Thirteenth Quartet is a horse’s skull,
the Fourteenth Quartet is a strand of black hair,
the Fifteenth Quartet is an empty room.

I keep them around both to remind me to listen to Shostakovich’s work more, and to remind me of how much can be said about music in how few words.