51�Թ�

“The note has a beginning, a middle and an end. This open string must not sound like an open string!”

Recalling his work on “Son of a Preacher Man,” Mr. Young told Premier Guitar magazine in 2016: “I was just sitting there goofing off. It’s sort of a Chet Atkins lick, because it uses an open string. They call them ‘identifying licks.’

He had just been in Issaquah to open “String,” a world premiere musical he directed about three Greek goddesses banished to the mortal plane.

For them, the act of drawing a bow across the open string of a cello, for example, is anathema, just as the octave doubling of a melodic line was for Schoenberg and the twelve-tone school.

He sped the piece up, and moved the song to a higher key so that he could use the vibrant sound of the cello’s lowest open string.