|
faux departs |
For piano quintet
faux departs takes its title from a fragmentary text by Samuel Beckett, and is explained by the music repeatedly returning to the same idiotically-simple four-note ‘idée fixe’ and attempting to extrapolate a sequence of musical structures from it, or upon it, or in opposition to it. Thus the composition as a whole is a series of ‘false starts’. Both piano and string quartet are of course established self-contained musical media, and in this work their divergent characters are often intensified. Also, the strings almost always function as a single unit; only very occasionally does one instrument or another break away from the co-ordinated activity of the quartet, another kind of false start, in the last of which the cello leads the music into a ‘dead end’. faux departs was commissioned by Ars Musica (Brussels) and the Cheltenham International Festival of Music, with funds from the Arts Council England South West and The Britten-Pears Foundation, for Ian Pace and the Arditti String Quartet and is dedicated to Brian Ferneyhough on his 60th birthday.
© Richard Barrett