SKU: PR.114405050

UPC: 680160008377. 11 x 14 inches.

Although structurally it subdivides into five movements, the entire quartet emerges as one vast continuum. There are no formal breaks between movements. However, certain musical signposts can be discerned, associated with each of the movements' terminations and new beginnings. The opening movement, The Nostalgia of Clanging Bell Sonorities, begins floating on recurrent Bbs whose soft rhythmic flow slowly puts into motion strong undercurrents suggestive of the latent power of water... After several suggestions of tolling bells, the movement gradually fades into hushed tones of veiled and very distant sonorities. It uses a unique efffect, for the first time in a musical context, conveyed through the use of extra heavy practice mutes. The second movement, The Spill of Water , disengages itself from the first through its distinct contrast in tempo. Water moves fast, and when it splashes, it tends to run wildly. In this case, it happens to be bubbly water that gushes forth bodly... smashing across rocky shorlines. So, too, the music attempts to conjure such moods. At the end of this movement, a cello cadenza emerges, introducing an introspective type of melodicism. The third movement, The Poignancy of Memory, contains many silences as it tries to convey memory through fragmented remembrances much like often occur in our dream state. Progressing through several slowly building images, it gradually works itself into juxtaposition of musical images. Towards the movement's end, high harmonics are sounding in all four instruments while left hand pizzicato notes in the cello pluch the last remembrances of this central core. Almost imperceptibly, the viola assumes leadership as it dissolves into: The fourth movement, The Fluidity of Motion, which has mostly the viola, but also the cello, articulating lyrical statements against the sheets of sound conjured up by the two violins playing a flood of swirling figures, evokes a kind of static motion in spae. Here, the virtually imperceptible manner in which this hushed whisper continues incessantly, can suggest the potential fluidity with which movement may inch forward... Later into the fourth movement , two fairly extended solos by the second and then the first violins, lead to a kind of spontaneous dialogue among the four instrumentalists. Eventually, this musical conversation gets caught up in: The fifth movement's The Rush of Time, which opens with a hushed flurry of speed, precipitates the Finale. It generates, at first slowly, but then very swiftly, whole shifts of rhythmic fields that initially seem to conflict with one another. Ultimately, this use of 'psycho-rhythmics contributes to an on-rush of motion and time. Rhythmic changes are, at times, abruptly precipitated with but little or no preparation creating a kind of inevitability in forward thrust, while the movement rushes forward with a feeling of gradual and continuous acceleration. It gathers density as more and more notes are piled progressively upon successive beats. The attempt is to spark tension and ignite excitement by means of frenetic confrontations of dissimilitudes. Ultimately - with the help of time - these polarities centrifically spin out their own destinies with their accompanying fall-out and own inevitable resolutions.

SKU: HL.14030980

ISBN 9788759871973. 12.0x16.0x0.285 inches.

Score available: KP00250 The composer writes: 'Even when I was writing Adieu, I knew that I wished to write Angel's Music. The title existed in an incomplete form in my mind and gradually more and more ideas and a few outlines became clear. The actual work on Angel's Music was started in Rome, where I spent the autumn of 1987 staying at The Danish Academy. Whether this stay has influenced the quartet or not is impossible to say. however, it is true to say that, in the Roman churches I visited, I saw countless angels playing in the top of frescoes and altars. Without these angels, together with the many crackled-gold paintings in this city and my general fascination with the Italian renaissance painter Fra Angelico, (in fact there are only a few paintings by him in Rome, but even his name..!) I am not sure my quartet would have been what it is. Anyway I do feel that there is a bit of Italy in the piece. The angels apart there are, in the short rhythmic agitating part of the quartet, reminiscences of the Italian medieval Trotto dance, and in the most expressive part of the piece there are flashes of Puccini-like music. From the very beginning of my work on the quartet, the distant, extremely muted sound in the high register which opens the piece, was on my mind. A sound satiated with a dense heterophonic and polyphonic texture of elegiac melody and vibrating trills. I imagined that little songs (maybe angel songs) could be created in this density, these songs constantly echoing themselves. Gradually as this sound got a more and more concrete musical and instrumental form, I felt, that not only should the little songs be created, played and die out in an echo, but also that the general pattern of the quartet should give the feeling of music which, from the distance, is getting closer and closer, culminates and at last disappears like an echo. Related to this, the general pattern of Angel's Music is divided into three: a pre-echo, culmination and echo.. The relationship between the three part is 5: 6: 4. The reason why I can say this precisely and prosaically is that it was necessary to me to mark the overall guidelines before I started to compose. I had to do this in order to enable the relationships to crawl from the general pattern almost fractionally into the smallest cells of the music, or more correctly; crawl from the small cells into the general pattern.'.