Quartet for Strings No. 4

978-0-19-358358-0 | Paperback | 26 May 2005

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The work is in one unbroken span that is formed from four linked movements.

Duration

25 minutes

Programme Notes

Anthony Powerss fourth quartet was commissioned by Cardiff University School of Music with funds from the Arts Council Wales and the Performing Rights Society, which sounds, one might feel, pretty dull information. But the circumstances were much more interesting. Powers holds a personal chair in the School, and deserves credit for the enhanced prestige and increasingly vigorous activity of its student composition programmes in recent years. His reward for such devotion to pedagogy has been that his new work, written for and dedicated to the Schools resident string quartet, has had to be composed, so to speak, under the eyes and ears of his students. The commission came with the understanding that the music would be workshopped by the Sorrel as it went along. More or less bleeding chunks of the sketches have been played and discussed during the year, and the composer has had to put into words the usually unspoken secrets of the studio and air his musical ideas in some cases before he has himself been sure of their exact import. There exist composers who would rather jump off Beachey Head than expose themselves in this way. Powers has not only jumped but he has emerged musically unscathed as well. The work is a typically cogent, strongly profiled single-movement structure that shows no trace of disruption or self-consciousness beyond what one might call the artistic personification of those qualities desirable in any 25-minute piece of music.
By its nature, Powers music is oppositional and argumentative. He will take sharply contrasted musical characters, raise the curtain on them, then stage-manage their disagreements into a rounded discussion, almost like a Plato dialogue. Here the brusque opening gestures (at least three) are allowed a brief skirmish before crystallising into a smoother more melodious music that works to some extent as a second subject (though its material is not strictly new). Later the opening music fades into a brilliant, quicksilver scherzo, apparently launched by an unobtrusive sextuplet figure originally played by the second violin at the start. Later still there is a broad Adagio, mainly quiet but with outbursts of emotional protest, after which the opening characters return, much altered, with still more drastic contrasts but in the end a calmer, at least provisionally more settled aspect.
The sketches reveal a somewhat different chronology. The abrupt chord sequence of the start was invented in its third form (after the second pause), and this is the form which controls the work and, depleted, ends it. The scherzo began with its last bar (there is no sextuplet in the sketch of the opening); and other beautiful material was either discarded or at least so altered as to be hard to trace in the end product. Powers has said that he sometimes begins with a big, general musical idea, sometimes with a clearly-formed one but no clear idea about how that ideas going to work itself into a big piece. This latter method, relevant in the present instance, might seem a suitable case for public experiment, and Powers students are fortunate indeed to have served as its guinea-pigs.
© 2005 Stephen Walsh

Quartet for Strings No. 4

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