Output details

Roger Quilter: Complete piano works

Research content/process:

This project examines the complete original piano works of Roger Quilter, and attempts to develop a performance idiom for this repertory. The four sets range from the op. 4 studies of 1901 up to the Four Country Pieces, op. 27, from 1923. Key to the interpretation not only of these keyboard works but also the accompaniments to the songs is understanding how Quilter’s inner-part voicing works, and how it might be interpreted. Unlocking this interpretation is helped enormously by Percy Grainger’s marked up copies of, not any of the formal keyboard music, but of Quilter’s keyboard arrangement (1912) of his own ‘Moonlight on the Lake’ from his stage work Where the Rainbow Ends. One of Grainger’s copies, now in the Grainger museum in Melbourne, is titled in Grainger’s hand ‘Study for bringing out a lower melody louder than a top melody’, and gives many indications of inflecting Quilter’s score by means of inventive fingerings, indications to sustain notes longer than indicated, bold pedalling and a number of other techniques. These indications of Granger’s interpretation of Quilter have much in common with Grainger’s own habits of indicating important and unimportant pitches in large and small notes, and – in turn – respond to Quilter’s own use of tied grace notes to indicate the voicing of the inner parts. The performances developed in this project therefore work backwards from Grainger, probing the idea that Quilter’s tied grace-notes do not need to be performed exactly as written but may in fact mask a performance idiom that Grainger’s notated performances uniquely reveal.