About A Series of Interdependencies, Tao writes: “I am often very moved by music that sounds as if it is barely struggling to stay together. I am also often activated by music specifically written to not be together. I feel like the practical need for players to be extremely in sync with one another in order to be strategically (or “correctly”) out of sync produces an interesting tension. a series of interdependencies is music that exists in that tension. Its five sections all demand a closeness between players, a shared sense of pulse even though regular pulse is often nowhere to be found. This is not a matter of one player being assigned to keep or indicate pulse; the piece is designed as a situation where all players have to navigate the beat as a shared responsibility. This is also music about the physicality of playing, found in the sounds of bows, fingerboards, the actual body of an instrument, players’ coordinated breath, and more. It is about celebrating that physicality, which seems particularly crackling with life in the context of chamber music. Much of A Series of Interdependencies was written in response to unease and anger, but all of it is infused with the hope that practicing vulnerability, intimacy, and mutuality with one another alongside radical heterogeneity might be a way into some better, a more utopian vision of the world. hence: the celebratory, ragged, ecstatic ending. jazz hands!”

–CONRAD TAO

Premiered on March 12, 2025, on the "Letters from Home" concert.