Scottish Music Centre - Catalogue

Programme Note

My last work for string quartet was 'Remembering Lepo', written in memory of the Estonian composer Lepo Sumera, and when I began to plan this new piece in the Spring of 2004, I was thinking about ideas of memory and identity. At first, I thought that I might extend the 'Lepo' idea further and write a set of character pieces 'immortalising' some of my composer friends and colleagues. A number of drawbacks soon presented themselves: artistically, each piece would have to develop in its own direction, so the resulting set might be incoherent stylistically and structurally. Besides that, my own focus on certain aspects of their character might not chime well with my friends' self-image and my portrayals could be misinterpreted as a kind of advice: composers do not welcome advice, even (or especially) when it is well meant.

Memory is also important in shaping our response to music: our response to each new sound is shaped by our remembrance of earlier events in the same work and related to our previous listening experiences. I explored this question compositionally, and the work includes reflections on materials drawn from earlier pieces: a little from my first quartet (particularly in the writing for solo viola), but also from 'Remembering Lepo" (the slower of the two violin duets). The largest self-quotation is in the extended soliloquy for cello, just before the final, fast section. Here, I have recomposed a song from my opera "An Turus" (The Journey), which was itself a development from music for the film "An Iobairt" (The Sacrifice). In each case the context of the music is different: in the film, a woman is driven past the scene of her husband's suicide, in the opera, Grainne pleads for Diarmid's love, in the new piece ...? Perhaps it's for the listener to arrive at their own interprettion of the psychological narrative, but for me it represents a resolution of the basic conflicts of the piece, allowing the final section the sense of a positive conclusion. (Somewhat ruefully, I confess that happy endings have not been a prominent feature of my work in the past.)

After deciding against provoking my colleagues with a set of character studies, I then planned the quartet as a large-scale single movement, in which two basic sets of material are continuously alternated n varied forms (one mainly slow and the other mainly fast - but not always) and interrupted by solo or duet reflections. When the whole piece was assembled, even I was taken aback by the unrelenting movement back and forth between new material and variants of earlier ideas. So now there are three movements, each new one taking up from where the last one left off. The overall shape is:

Movement I: Ensemble, viola solo 1, ensemble.
Movement II: Viola solo 2, ensemble, violin duet 1.
Movement III: Violin duet 2, ensemble, cello solo, ensemble.

Another discovery was an underlying similarity between the basic sets of opposing material, explained, perhaps, and clarified by the solo cello.

William Sweeney
May 2005.