Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow

Instrumentation: Flute, Oboe, Trumpet, and Two Percussionists

Duration: ca. 7:00

Program Note:

Pangrams (sentences which use every letter of an alphabet at least once) are useful tools for the development of typography and graphic designs. These sentences offer typeface designers, calligraphers, and others means to show off their technical skills in a way that features each glyph for closer inspection. However, pangrams also pose wonderful creative and linguistic challenges.

Something of a small and highly-constrained poem, a pangram such as the well-known “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” encapsulates the puzzle of its construction within fanciful and often bizarre language. “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!” is close to being a perfect pangram – the letters A, O, and U are each repeated once. I employed the patterns of the words and letters in the sentence as material to construct this piece, but what I hoped to capture most was the strange and wonderful imagery of this pangram- command. Sphinx of Black Quartz… imagines the world, characters, and dialogue implied by this wonderful pangram – a fragment of language simultaneously packed with meaning and devoid of context.

Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow was written for the 2026 Nief-Norf Summer Festival at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. It was premiered by Phoebe Pylant (flute), Kayla Smith (oboe), Diana Gonzalez (trumpet), Joseph Woodburn (percusison), and Grace Burton (percusison) with Violet Hill conducting.