Over the years, in my personal search for the Perfect Sound, I have made several recordings of scales, both diatonic and chromatic, in an attempt to condense the sum total of my many years of string playing into the individual notes that are the atomic particles of all music.
Time being what it is, my experience is finite and the result necessarily imperfect. The act of recording poses its own problems of hiss, click, and vibration. The act of listening, changing as it does from hall to hall, from room to room, from ear to ear, further complicates the quest, editing out vast possibilities from the enormous repertoire implied by my scales.
No longer a scale of Western chromatics, or Eastern quarter-tones, or all-encompassing glissandi whose compass is still limited by physics and anatomy—the Perfect Sound will capture the disembodied moment of infinite possibility.
The moment between the upswing of the bow and the down. The moment of the touching of the string. The moment between the climax and the eruption, the wide-eyed stare shared by sperm and egg before the inevitable. The moment before birth, the unborn baby still undistanced. It will be a moment carrying thought and potential in all their musical brilliance, before life disappoints and diminishes. It will be a triumph over Time, Motion, and Beauty.
Remember—“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” is a question as much of motion as of ambition.
—Sandor, In Search of the Lost Chord, A Brief Guide, p. 265