On our farm in Nuzerov, in the Czech Republic, meaning Chestnut Village, the environment in which I found myself composing was just short of insanity. If it wasn’t my five years old son playing his videos, it was my father-in-law, who is hard of hearing, watching television at deafening volumes, or my wife’s nephew playing heavy metal tapes at chromosome damaging levels. My focus is beyond lethal. I assume if I made eye contact with someone while deep in the midst [of composing], I’d burn a hole in them. At the speed of music, I have journeyed through sixty-five days in seventy minutes and feel, in retrospect, as if it were only a blink of an eye. The two thousand measures of music that comprise STRING QUARTETS #3, 4 & 5 feel as if one journey and should be played as such, a triptych, if you will. In this world of no attention span, “one trick ponies”, perpetual self involvement and relentless mediocrity, I find myself in my own self-indulgences so not to go mad from boredom. My insane hard work and refusal to settle and being haunted by the unrequited feelings of “not finished”, obviously, have driven me to my many compositional successes. But, then there are those certain works, which come from a place where I can only assume my collaborative input was the ability to listen to a higher consciousness. I often listen to my work in a process of refining and find myself so many times, wondering, “How in the world did I manage to write that?! One might say that I’m in a perpetual psycho-cybernetic process of listening ... constantly aware of continuity and balance ... suspending time within boundaries (if there really are any) of composition. Hayden Wayne (composer/librettist) may be one of the first in his generation to take the rare route through pop/rock music's highest levels to reach where he is today. He began playing piano at the age of four and played tenor drum in the orchestra pit of The King And I at the age of five which his father was conducting, and performed his first composition in concert at the age of eleven. He won a second prize medal for piano solo from the New York State Music Awards at fifteen. The '70s saw him performing in the pop/rock world for such major-label backed bands as Man (CBS Records) and Jobriath (Elektra Records). He toured with the likes of Sly Stone, the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page, Billy Joel, Gordon Lightfoot, Gladys Knight and the Fifth Dimension. Eventually, tired of touring, he took (or rather went back) to composing. In his unique position - with a classical training and a wealth of pop/rock experience - he began experimenting with a synthesis of various genres/styles. As a composer, in 1983 Mr. Wayne opened a new theater for the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles with his metaphorical circus WIRE, won $10,000 USD as national first place in 1987 from the National Institute for Music Theater with NEON (A Street Opera) . In 2000, NEON won a 25,000 DM prize in the International Prague Opera Competition. He was commissioned to write IN MEMORIAM: A CELEBRATION, by the Interfaith Concert of Holocaust Remembrance, which premiered at Saint John the Divine in New York in 1993. Subsequently linked with SINFONIETTA # 1: THE KLEZMER and AN ELEGY INTO MADNESS, specifically commissioned for the Fiftieth Anniversary of Israel, and titled A TRIPTYCH, had its world première at Mandel Hall, the University of Chicago in January 1998. In February 1995, his SYMPHONY #4-FUNK had its world premiere at the Janacek Theatre in Brno, The Czech Republic. It sold out in one week seven months in advance and was requested to be part of the Twentieth Century Music Festival and performed at The Rudolfinum in Prague October 21, 1995. The recording of the work would ultimately find itself on the music play-list of President Bill Clinton’s Air Force One! Mr. Wayne also has several film scores and award-winning commercials for television to his credit. To date, Mr. Wayne has written over four hundred compositions including: SYMPHONY #1-THE SYMPHONY OF FRIENDS, the ballet CIRQUE DE LA LUNE, DRACULA (Opera Erotica), PIANO CONCERTO #1 (The Rock "n' Roll) and CELLO CONCERTO #1 which are paired as a diptych: SINFONIETTA #2 (It's a Boy) and #3 (The Emerald); VIOLIN/PIANO SONATA (The "Kraft"); The Symphonic Trilogy: #2-REGGAE, #3-HEAVY METAL, #4-FUNK; and SYMPHONY #5 AFRICA [A Tone Poem] (all recorded by the State Philharmonic of Brno, on New Millennium Records); the choral symphony SYMPHONY #6-THE GIFT; SYMPHONY #7-CELESTIAL DANCES and SYMPHONY #8-1421; the string quartets: THE NUZEROV QUARTETS #1-The Rosenberger Variations and #2-The Romantic, # 3, 4 & 5, #6, 7 & 8, and # 9 & 10, performed by the Wallinger String Quartet; FIVE DANCES FOR CELLO AND PIANO and PIANO QUINTET #1 (all available on New Millennium Records), and hundreds of songs in various eclectic styles. The Wallinger String Quartet, one of the most accomplished young ensembles from the Moravian region of the Czech Republic, originally came together in 1986 at the Brno Conservatory, and became a professional adjunct to the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra. The current members: Pavel Wallinger, first violin; Jan Vasta, second violin; Miroslav Kovar, viola; Jan Skrdlik, violoncello. All studied at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. Prominent Czech artists from the Moravian, Janacek and Smetana Quartets contributed to the artistic development of both the individual players and the quartet as a whole. In 1987 the Quartet won the Beethoven Prize at the Hradec Competition and was also honored at the 1988 International Prague Spring Competition and the 1990 Evian Competition in France among others. The ensemble has been heard in Austria, France, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Africa. It made its North American debut in 1993 with a twenty-five concerts tour of the east coast. The following year the Wallinger appeared at festivals in Paris and Lyons and were featured at the International Festival of String Quartets in Prague.