Output details

Ghosts of Great Violence for string quartet

Commissioned by the Martin Harris Centre for the Quatuor Danel with funds provided by the Britten-Pears Foundation. Published: Edition Peters, London: ii + 67 pp. Duration: 30 minutes. Premiere (three-movement version): New Music North West Festival by Quatuor Danel, March 8, 2012, and in the Memorial Hall of Manchester Grammar School, March 9, 2012. Premiere (four-movement final version): Manchester Grammar School, February 22, 2013. Further performances: Herve, Belgium and Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, Taiwan. Recorded for release on the Prima Facie label in 2014. This work was inspired by research of, and visits to Western Front battlefields and memorials of World War I, in particular those located around the Somme. It explores constantly changing background and foreground relationships, for which the string quartet medium is suited. This often results in the superimposition of opposites such as the loud snap and quiet quaver pizzicato at the beginning of Movement III. Another manifestation of this approach can be found in the use of instrumental solos inspired by the interior monologue technique employed by Ford Madox Ford in his tetralogy of novels entitled Parade's End, which are set around World War I, and which I discovered as a result of the above-mentioned research. The research methodology involved finding analogies for this extra-musical source. An example occurs in Movement III, in which the second violin suddenly plays an anxious line to the fore of the texture, while the other instruments maintain the momentum of the music, but recede into the background. (See bars 180-196). The most extreme use of this Ford-inspired technique can be found in Movement IV, in which foreground interior monologues and background spectral colloquies dominate. The above research has been presented in a lecture on memorialisation at Manchester Grammar School.