Visions and Revisions (2013) for string quartet [11:30] <a href="http://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/christopher-trapani-waterlines">Christopher Trapani: Waterlines by Christopher Trapani</a> Visions and Revisions is a piece about circular thinking, a recurring focus bordering on the obsessive. Memory, rather than offering signposts for development, plays an intrusive role, as if the music is always trying to move elsewhere but gets continually stuck, distracted by involuntary slips into the past… The template is Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Visions of Johanna.” Five verses, five variations. Each pushes further into new harmonic territory, but is always dragged back to three basic chords and their just intonation extensions. Gestures inspired by what Dylan later called “that thin, that wild mercury sound” surface throughout: plucked guitars, expressive vocal slides, harmonica swells and bends… Just as Dylan’s fifth verse spills over the established form (you can hear the Nashville session musicians scrambling to follow him on Blonde on Blonde), the fifth variation breaks through the frame, as loops and cycles pile up and recollections calcify, then crumble… Visions and Revisions was commissioned by the Wigmore Hall for the JACK Quartet and premiered in London on January 23, 2014.