“The rain was invisible in the darkness of the streets, but it hung like the sparkling fringe of a lampshade under the corner light…There was a thin gruel of mud on the pavements; he felt a gluey suction under his shoe soles and a chill slipping down past his collar.” (256)
“The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset. The harsh, distant clatter kept going through the rattle of the chains which a young man in blue overalls was fastening over the machinery, securing it to the flatcars lined on the siding of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company of Connecticut.” (269)
“The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky. Among the colors of a picture post card, the car’s hood looked like the work of a jewler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.” (279)
“A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.” (283)
–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
These are just a few of the images in Atlas‘ ninth chapter, “The Sacred and the Profane”. Directly juxtaposing these images creates a set of stark contrasts. In my just-completed string quartet, titled after this chapter, I attempt to capture a journey through contrasting and diverse images like these. There are sweeping melodies, brief hints of rustic fiddling, sputtering polyrhythmic textures that mimic machinery, and desolate soundscapes that invoke ruins not unlike those described above. The ending section of the work synthesizes elements of the preceding images into a “sacred” whole: the violins “mechanize” textures from the piece’s opening by playing them pizzicato and col legno, while the viola and cello turn the unsettling chorales heard previously into rich, sonorous consonance. This apotheosis is short-lived; it quickly evaporates as filigree gestures ascend into the stratosphere, leaving behind violin harmonics that rapidly fade away.
