Partite Requiem was written in remembrance of the life and work of one of America’s most remarkable 20th-century composers, just-intonation pioneer Ben Johnston (1926- 2019). I had the opportunity to meet Ben in 2008, when we worked together to realise a performance of his long unheard orchestra work at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in Germany. His gentleness, warmth, and insight has had a profound influence on my own work. He suggested that choices we make in artistic creation might come from sensing the interconnectedness of things: of thought, matter, and vibration. As makers, we share a responsibility to reveal such experiences in all their complexity and simplicity: direct, true, untempered, unadorned. The perception of harmonic sound senses proportional relationships of frequencies as interactions of tone, opening a subtle continuum of relative consonance and dissonance, becoming melody, counterpoint, music.

— Marc Sabat