Output details

‘Dances and Laments’ (violin & cello duo)

Commissioned by the Consonances Festival in St Nazaire, France, and premiered there in the abandoned wartime Nazi Submarine Base (which constitutes the town’s main auditorium) in September 2010.

The work received its UK premiere in January 2012 at Kings Place, London.

Recording issued by Guild Music on CD in July 2013 (GMCD 7397): Philippe Graffin (violin) & Henri Demarquette (cello).

The research question here is to consider the dynamic of a genre at the opposite end of the instrumental spectrum from works such as the Piano Concerto, i.e. going from sixty piece orchestra to just two instruments: solo violin and cello. This is one of the most challenging types of piece to write, with no harmony instrument (e.g. piano) and nothing to provide contrapuntal cover and texture. If writing a string quartet is a traditional test of compositional invention and technical skill, then such a duo (as only half a quartet) is doubly challenging. Ravel's Duo (1922) is an unusual, sparsely written work in his oeuvre, and through writing my own piece I began to see that its style was probably not a deliberate set of expressive choices, but the aesthetic outcome of the strict parameters of the medium itself. I was therefore able to obtain an insight that could probably only be gained by such practical means, rather than by traditional analytical or musicological investigation, and to articulate that insight creatively. Dances and Laments intersperses dance-like movements with lamenting melodic writing: movements 1-2 and 3-5 are closely thematically linked to give the work an organic coherence and unity.

The approach, building upon my sustained creative work in the field, was to further develop my technique of string writing (from the two string quartets, two piano trios, Cello Sonata, etc.: see GMCD 7343: 2010), and pare down my approach to meet the challenges of the medium without compromising musical meaning. It demonstrates my distinctive compositional voice and an approach that sits crucially in the void between modernism and postmodernism: a style that is only now beginning to be documented by analytical and historical musicologists, using working terms such as 'second modernism' (Mahnkopf, 2009; Metzer, 2010) and 'neomodernism' (Dromey, 2013).