Music of the Open Road

ensemble string quartet
written spring-summer 2026
duration 20 minutes

for the Orange Road Quartet, with love

program notes

I can’t fully explain why I’ve recently become so entranced by Walt Whitman’s poetry, but it so happens that the Good Gray Poet’s work has inspired three pieces of mine in the last six months. Maybe it’s his verse’s earthiness, its naturalistic sensuality an antidote to today’s technological alienation. Maybe it’s the writing’s headstrong optimism, recognizing and resisting the world’s oppressive forces with wit and defiance. Or maybe it’s in his impassioned championing of the individual’s might, particularly in an era of inevitability narratives and democratic backsliding.

In any case, I resonate with Whitman’s resolve never to create hopeless, cynical work despite living in profoundly cynical times. Even in the face of the Civil War, he strove to create a ‘new Literature... a new Poetry’ that would be ‘the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American democracy.’ There was no hierarchy in his writing, no kings, oligarchs, despots, nor even metrical symmetries; his works were freely proportioned, composed of colloquialisms and popular vernacular colored with dashes of foreign languages and slang. He penned anthems for the Union army, odes to free love, hymns to labor, songs celebrating young people. His work, taken as a whole, felt to me like the embodiment of the American soul at its best, despite being written against the backdrop of the country’s very worst traumas.

Music of the Open Road is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a response to Whitman’s classic Song of the Open Road. Few poems of his captured the spirit of unrestrained joy quite like this one, and my piece is similarly unabashed in its rough-hewn optimism and celebratory energy. The music draws on the sounds of fiddle and viol, capturing a rustic personality even in its wild virtuosity. The writing is deliberately non-hierarchic, highlighting each member of the quartet in turn while still treating the ensemble as an organism of its own. Throughout, there is a constant sense of motion, evoking the forward momentum of Whitman’s poetry. Despite loosely following the progression of the original poem, the music is broadly structured in a fast-slow-fast arch form: the piece gets going with a vibrant perpetuum mobile, gives way to an early-music informed slow section, and culminates in a frenetic, bluegrass-esque sprint to the finish.

I owe much thanks to the fantastic people of the Orange Road Quartet, whose intrepid tastes, impressive skill, and generous support of my work made this piece possible.