Andrew McIntosh

Hyenas

Drops of patterned piano rain, falling across keyboards. Simple to begin, yet spinning into greater and greater complexity. A planned and constructed edifice that holds wildness within.

The title of composer Andrew McIntosh’s work—Hyenas in the temples of pleasure—is based on a translation by poet Brendan Constantine of a verse from the Old Testament:

“…wild beasts shall lie there,
and owls shall call there,
and satyrs shall dance there,
and hyenas shall cry in the temples of pleasure…”
—Isaiah 13:21-22 (translated by Brendan Constantine)

Each of the movements is related to an element of Constantine’s poem of the same name. In dark, savage language, Constantine conjures a world gone to ruin, where nocturnal scavengers feed on the remains:

Great feet. Spectacular teeth. Eyes that are sideways to everyone but God.
I sing and they laugh. I make them partners and they dance. I feed them my city's dead
and they linger.

McIntosh remembers his starting point was to create “a strange fantasy about memory.” Indeed, the work seems to conjure a sort of mythological ancient language, an impressive musical temple overgrown with weeds.

Hyenas represents a pivot point in McIntosh’s career. Earlier works deployed strict and sometimes arcane processes. For instance, the piece written directly prior included a 48-minute polyrhythm in which all the rhythmic relationships between pitches exactly match the frequency relationships. “It took two years to write.”

Now there is much more freedom. “I am much more likely to record my improvisations and develop that into the compositions.” That strategy gave him works like Arc, the second work on this program.

Baroque

As a child, it seemed arbitrary to McIntosh that the violin was tuned always to the same four notes. He found himself experimenting, retuning the strings, improvising for hours. “I would get a knock at the door and my mother would be like, ‘What is going on in there?!’”

After the revelatory discovery of microtonal music—intervals that live in the cracks of the piano—someone introduced McIntosh to the ‘Rosary’ Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. “It was one of those head exploding moments.”

McIntosh fell in love with this repertoire and went back to school for an early music degree. This world was balm. For someone who was looking for alternatives to the modern symphony orchestra model, “there was something less totalitarian about the smaller early music groups. You have more agency.”

And the Baroque interest in rhetoric also pointed a way forward for his compositional work. “To me, the word ‘rhetoric’ means that every movement of a piece, or even the whole piece, serves to illuminate a single idea. There is an utter sense of focus.”

Arc

Arc represents singular, clear, unbroken musical focus. This miniature work resulted from McIntosh’s own improvisations on a retuned violin, a more regular compositional strategy as he moved away from a focus on algorithmic systems.

In Arc, McIntosh explores the simplest possible intervals in just intonation, a tuning system where the frequencies of notes are based on whole number ratios, creating some “pure" intervals. ​​For McIntosh, “just intonation is more or less a simplified representation of the way that sound works naturally.”

Though quiet and slow, the extremely fragile work is difficult to play. “I have a tendency to write music that looks very simple and straightforward on the page and then people go to play it and say, ‘Oh my God, this is so hard.’”

Not the ending point

Classical music was McIntosh’s starting point. “As a kid I loved the literature of classical music—the ‘Canon,’ for lack of a better word.”

He found himself seeking the darker side. Falling for Rachmaninoff’s Études-Tableaux, McIntosh would program his CD player in such a way that it played him only the pieces in minor keys.

Classical music was the starting point, but not the ending point. As a twelve-year-old, he heard a visiting quartet play a Shostakovich string quartet. “It completely shattered my conception of what music could be and what music could do.”

That moment sparked curiosity and change. “It took me out of classical music for a while. I became much more interested in 80s punk rock and skateboarding.” In fact, McIntosh came to resent his instrument, and it was only after he went to study violin performance at college that he found pathways back to it.

Slow 1

“I don't write that much music, because it takes me a long time. It's kind of meditative. It's like a ritual. When I sit down to write, I start with this very mindless process that also just kind of declutters all the stress.”

McIntosh slows himself during the physical act of composition. He draws lines on his music paper by hand, with only a ruler to assist. And he works through time-intensive systems to generate structures in his music.

Particularly in the earlier works on this program, McIntosh used mathematical systems to determine aspects of the tuning or the flow of harmony. He used to see systems/patterns and the physical/organic as in opposition. But now McIntosh notices systems and patterns in nature—“the way branches and leaves grow on trees, gravity, orbits of planets.”

We See the Flying Bird

This work began with a question.

Vibraphones have spinning discs that vibrate each pitch as it’s struck. McIntosh was curious about what happens if two played the same material with the motors at different speeds. “Turns out it sounds like 1960s space music!” With that starting point, where does the music want to lead?

We See the Flying Bird has one big story and many little stories. The big story: a single melody transforming into lush, rich, resonant textures (“by the end it's hocketing, with these little microtonal scales that then get harmonized”). The many stories: various detours that take us through strange, disembodied, surprising worlds.

The title is from a book that was popular during the cresting 1960s wave of American fascination with Buddhism: Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (“a favorite of John Cage’s”):

So we say true understanding will come out of emptiness. When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly … We see the flying bird. Sometimes we see the trace of it. Actually we cannot see the trace of a flying bird, but sometimes we feel as if we could. This is also good.

“I'm not religious in any form,” says McIntosh, “but I like contemplating other people's way of thinking about a spiritual life or being a human in the world. And I found that book really useful at the time. A sense of focus and space—decluttering your thoughts when dealing with sound. So that music can become a sort of sacred space.”

Slow 2

As much as he’s able, McIntosh leaves the buzz of the city by going into the mountains. Climbing and hiking in solitude. “As a child I internalized a love of and familiarity with desert, openness, and solitude, growing up in rural northern Nevada where the high desert landscape of basin and range meets the eastern escarpment of the Sierra mountains.”

McIntosh grew up on the edge of the desert. “I could just hop on my bike and then be in the middle of nowhere very quickly.” This openness gave McIntosh autonomy, a comfort with solitude. “It's a sense of not being in a hurry, even if the music is fast. I'm drawn to that, in sound or in art.”

Through his career, that attention to slowness has given him the opportunity to ground himself, to find out how his music can grow organically. “It's a self-imposed austerity just for the purpose of being able to focus better.”

Little Jimmy

One day, prior to the pandemic, McIntosh read an article about a person who claimed they could identify pine trees on a distant hillside by the sound of the wind. “The needles of the different species of pine are all different, so they produce a different sound.”

It became a pandemic project. “I was going to try to record all 18 species of California pines and then compare the recordings.” He never finished this project, but found the recordings beautiful, and wanted to add instruments.

In this work, the pianos and percussionists play quintets with the wind. “Since wind is basically white noise, you can pull out pitches from the spectrum. The instruments will be harmonized in the wind.”

While McIntosh was composing the piece some of the very trees in the recording were destroyed by wildfire. Suddenly, the piece held unintended but unmistakable new power. Little Jimmy was no longer simply about the sonic qualities of trees, but also about memory, about climate change.

Touch

In grad school, McIntosh founded a string quartet. One of the first things they played was the Luigi Nono string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima. “It made me see music in an utterly different light. There was a sense of ‘touch’ in the music. That every single sound feels like it's being formed in the clay as you make it.”

McIntosh struggles to fully explain the meaning of the word, which has such power for him. “‘Touch’ represents a kind of motion. No matter how static the music appears at first glance, if you look a little closer, it's always moving. I'm always trying to write music that is being shaped in every moment.”

Yarn/Wire

McIntosh received an email out of the blue. A request for a new work by the respected and skilled champions of music by living composers, Yarn/Wire.

He was taken aback. McIntosh was quite young, and known more as a violinist than as a composer. “They took a risk in reaching out to me.” He soon found that the group put absolute trust in him, and this trust was valuable—it gave him confidence as a composer.

McIntosh remains amazed by Yarn/Wire's technical skill and absolute dedication as an ensemble. “They don't cut any corners. They are committed to—I can’t think of a better way of saying this—being utterly excellent.”

For this new commission, McIntosh is working more intensively with the group. “Everything I've written for them so far, I compose in isolation, and a score is ready in time for the rehearsal period.”

This process began with a workshop of sketched materials in New York. “I’m curious to see what comes out of having the opportunity to work with them on something while it's still more flexible.”

New work

Andrew McIntosh’s new work is commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University and is made possible through the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program with funding from the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Its unusual combination—viola with piano and percussion quartet—has a central hurdle. “It has a real danger of sounding like oil and water.” Viola floating atop four mechanical instruments. “I'm trying to be sensitive to how the sounds combine and blend.”

This issue has led McIntosh to design a very simple structure. In the first half of the piece, the viola lives behind the quartet, dwelling in the musical background. At a pivot point, the viola takes the resonance of the quartet, and oil and water switch places.

McIntosh has also challenged himself to create a long arc for the work. “In earlier music I gravitated towards writing miniatures, stringing them together to create a sense of form. For this piece I really wanted to write a longer shape.”

The unknown

Across this program there is a clear evolution. A distillation of ideas, a clarification.

“When I was younger I just wanted to try out everything. Maybe as you get older you sort of say, ‘Well, now I've tried a bunch of different things and I have a better idea what I want to focus on.’”

McIntosh was interested in moving away from the kind of composition that was extremely rigorous. But he didn’t want there to be a loss.

“At the same time, I never want to lose that sense of curiosity. I never want to settle into thinking, ‘OK, well, now I've figured out how I make music.’ The unknown is part of what's engaging and interesting about making music.”

Tim Munro is a Brisbane-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia.

Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, without the prior written permission of the author.