Output details

Tales from the Golden City

As a non-string player who up till this point had always had a slight problem with unaccompanied string music, I wanted in this piece to explore the considerable challenge of how the four strings of a violin could carry the narrative of an eight-minute piece convincingly. I imagined a sort of 'Scheherazade' form, whereby a series of 'tales' are told, interspersed with the musical equivalent of 'once upon a time', of a deliberately rather anonymous character. One other feature of this piece is my attempt to integrate tonal, 'folkloric' material (most obviously in the last 'tale') into a basically pan-tonal structure. This is an area of compositional research I intend to continue exploring in future pieces, as I feel it is important to make such connections, without any hint of 'cross-over', with which I do not personally feel comfortable.