Name: Van, Zandt Jack: Strange Loops
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Van, Zandt Jack: Strange Loops

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In Strange Loops for string quartet, the composer explores the paradoxical mathematical concept first introduced by Douglas Hofstadter in his revolutionary book, Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. A strange loop is a hierarchical structure with repetitive layers whereby moving through the various levels one returns to the starting point. Many of the artworks of M. C. Escher display such systems, as do the contrapuntal structures of J. S. Bach, in The Musical Offering for instance. There are literary examples as well that can be seen in the work of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others.

The composer found analogues for this mathematical device in the real world, including observing the effect of a number of dancing Sufis, Semazen, also known as “whirling dervishes,” which became the model for the first of the quartet’s three movements.

The second movement is an adaptation from T. S. Elliot’s poem, The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men . . .

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion . . .

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This brought to mind a strange loop form whereby the parts of something with little energy attempt to come into being only to be defeated by exhaustion, then to begin again, destined to repeat the cycle until all energy is used up.

The final movement, Chant, is a cyclic variation form based on a fragment of a Tibetan Buddhist chant where each instrument decorates the cantus within the confines of its own temporal zone that is in proportion to the others (divisions of 6, 7, 8 and 9), creating a kind of slow motion Doppler effect.

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