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13 Self Portraits (2002) |
String Quartet
Having been written at a time when the majority of my musical activities are exploring different directions in which collaborative work might be taken, 13 selfportraits takes an opposite trajectory. During work on it, I found myself asking what it might mean for music to be "introspective". When this particular music looks in on itself, it seems to find a certain amount of emptiness - in this and other respects it forms a counterpart to the much denser Blattwerk for cello and electronics. While Blattwerk is centrally concerned with the idea of proliferation, this quartet is often in danger of disappearing altogether.
Although it does indeed consist of thirteen structural elements (of widely differing durations), these do not follow each other in sequence but are often fragmented, alternated, superimposed and so on; one of them is distributed throughout the work's duration, ending as well as beginning it, and reappearing within and between the others. So it is neither a composition in several independent parts nor a single unfolding time span, but a combination of the two.
I am rather intrigued by the fact that exactly the same music might be described as "confused and incoherent" or on the other hand "a sequence of exquisite miniatures" depending on whether it presents itself in the form of separate "movements" or not. (Imagine, for example, playing Webern's op.10 without any breaks between the pieces, or even overlapping them...) The present work attempts not to define itself one way or the other, so that if it does sound confused, then perhaps it might be exquisitely so. 13 selfportraits was initially motivated by the sequence of self-portraits by Rembrandt, which embody a poetic documentation of ageing. What could be meant by a musical "selfportrait"?
Another aspect of "introspection" in this music is that much of it derives in various ways from a number of previous works of mine, a feature which, however, one would not often actually hear even with a knowledge of the models in question. I was not interested in "recycling" material or indulging in a private orgy of self-reference; the intention was primarily to make the aforementioned structural elements as disparate as possible from one another in "origin", as if, like Rembrandt's images, they spanned a lifetime. 13 selfportraits was written for the Kairos Quartet and was commissioned jointly by Wien Modern and the BBC. It is dedicated to Ingrid Beirer.
© Richard Barrett