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Strangeness (1985) |
string quartet - 15'
"'Making strange' (ostranenie): according to Shklovsky, the essential function
of poetic art is to counteract the process of habituation encouraged by routine
everyday modes of perception. We very cease to 'see' the world we live in,
and become anaesthetised to its distinctive features. The iam of poetry is
to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are overly familiar,
to 'creatively deform' the usual, the normal, and so to inculcate a new, child-like,
non jaded vision in us."
Structuralism and Semiotics, Terence Hawkes (Methuen 1977)
I regard all my works as steps towards the evaporation of notes, and of musical materials, revealing the underlying archetypes. Accordingly, I tend to view notes as the particles making apparent the force fields immanent in the pieces' form. In my quartet the notes are particles exhibiting "Strangeness: a quantum number which represents unexplained delay in strong interactions..." (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary)
Formally and expressively Strangeness is the converse of my absurdly extrovert piano piece Tilt. Tilt is fractured, as is Strangeness, but whereas in the former the cracks are caused by other musics bursting through, in Strangeness the discontinuities are those of a discourse fragmented by its own pathology ('estrangedness').
© Chris Dench