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Kandinsky (1996-2003) |
guitar quartet – 9'
This work was commissioned by The English Guitar Quartet for the Isle of Man Festival in 1996. This version, however, is a revision and partial recomposition of the earlier work including an entirely new first movement.
In the early 1900s, the Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky became involved with a teaching and research centre known as The Bauhaus. During his time there (in Germany), he gave many lectures, many of them written down and published later in book form.
Perhaps his most famous book is one entitled ‘Point and Line to Plane’. In this ‘treatise’, Kandinsky proposes that all art forms (including music), are saturated with formal processes that relate to notions of points, lines and planes. In musical terms, we can easily (and in Kandinsky’s own terms too), think of single and groups of pitches (clusters) as kinds of ‘points’. Lines of course, are the continual unfolding and coiling of successive pitches in a form that we might call ‘melody’ or ‘tune’. Plane is used (by Kandinsky) to encapsulate the idea of ‘mass’ or ‘texture’. In musical terms this idea could be (and is) applied to harmony, being the simultaneous presentation of groups of lines or coalescences of lines in a mass of material that is as rich and dense vertically as it is in horizontal formats.
This quartet treats (musically) on Kandinsky’s triad of formal considerations, namely 3 movements with the titles, point-line-plane(s). It is a piece that is intended to evoke more than just acts of listening. Rather, it is written (and sounds) in such a way that the listener is invited to visualise the music in spatial and temporal terms as well.
Edward Cowie
Devon. 2003.