The Cold Dancer: contemporary string quartets from Scotland

Edinburgh Quartet

Charles Mutter / violin

Philip Burrin / violin

Michael Beeston / viola

Mark Bailey / cello

The cold dancer

Contemporary string quartets from Scotland

1 String Quartet No 4 (The Cold Dancer)* [2005][12:22]

Kenneth Dempster (b. 1962)

2 The Great Divorce for string quartet* [1990][16:03]

James Clapperton (b. 1968)

String Quartet [1990]

Judith Weir (b. 1954)

3 Serene – attacca – [5:38]

4 Con moto – attacca – [5:05]

5 Presto [2:40]

String Quartet No 3* [2004]

William Sweeney (b. 1950)

6 Lento/Allegro – Andante, un poco lento (viola solo) – Allegro [9:12]

7 Andante/Più lento (viola solo) – Lento/Allegro –Con moto q =120 [10:13]

8 Tempo rubato q =ca.60 – Vivace – Molto rubato, espressivo (cello solo) – Vivace [17:09]

Total playing time: [78:24]

*world premiere recordings

Recorded in Colinton Parish Church, Edinburgh, on 1, 2 and 3 February 2006.

Recorded with 24-bit stereo technology

Producer: Paul Baxter

24-Bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-Bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: John Christ

Photography: © 2006

Delphian Records Ltd

Photograph Editing: Raymond Parks

Notes on the music

One of the stories told by historians of Western music concerns the migration of standard genres to the geographical margins. It is a story especially persuasive with regard to the string quartet, which has often been viewed as the traditional genre par excellence. Of course, ‘tradition’ in this context refers to one tradition in particular, that of the Western classical music performed in European salons and concert-halls from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and that is certainly not the only tradition which may come to mind when we hear music played on stringed instruments. There are also the traditions of string playing by folk musicians – the gypsy fiddlers of Central Europe, for instance – which as early as Haydn were finding their way into the string quartet.

For a composer working today, it is the example of Bartók’s quartets – as messages to the Austro-German tradition from a composer deeply imbued with the spirit of folk music – that may be clearest in the background. That is not to say that there are not as many ways to write for the medium as there are ensembles performing such works. But the instrumental line-up of two violins, viola and cello retains its special associations and much of its prestige. It is a genre as well as a medium. And more than most genres, the string quartet commands seriousness. It invites major statements.

It also invites individual expression. Its challenge is an opportunity, for a composer wishing to add his or her own voice to that tradition. Composers have vouchsafed some of their most personal thoughts to this most intimate medium, and the programme of four works recorded here is both a snapshot of four ‘contemporary voices’ and an index of Western music’s capacity for renewal from within and without – a testament to the endless, and endlessly absorbing, interaction of the personal and the traditional against the background of a genre which shows no sign of exhausting itself.

Kenneth Dempster’s String Quartet No 4 (The Cold Dancer) was written in 2005 to a commission from the Edinburgh Quartet, with subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council and with a donation provided by Mr Ian Tomlin under the auspices of Napier University’s Composer in Residence scheme. Its title and inspiration come from an extraordinary poem by George Mackay Brown, ‘A Reel of Seven Fishermen’, where grammatical simplicity does not preclude enigmatically powerful meaning. On the surface, the poem proceeds by simple statement, line on line. Without a subordinate clause in sight, the reader’s slowly dawning comprehension of the events described, and of their impact on the lives of the three characters – bride, mother, fisherman –

is left to the workings of implication and poetic valency:

She turned quernstones, circle on circle. The Book lay open, two white halves. Twelve arms sought the cold dancer.

Only with the last line (‘Then …’) is temporal relation made explicit:

Sea streamed like blood on the floor. They shrieked, gull mouths. Then bride and mother bowed to the black music.

The quartet communicates an equally powerful sense of emotional depths which belie its outward span of 12 minutes. It is not so much a question of concision as of developing a musical language invested with the weight of memory and experience. The style of the opening, with its extreme fluidity of rhythm and harmony, crystallises from time to time into fragments of dance- and hymn-like passages, as if it were assembling echoes of a music which had been played in full elsewhere, outside the piece. In the composer’s words,

sounds of distant psalm-singing are mixed with echoes of the fiddle tunes that are played on days of celebration. This gathering collage of memories forms the main part of the work and spans the past, present and future turmoil of the three principal characters.

After a recapitulation of the vigorous opening gesture, the music turns gradually inwards, and its lyrical intensity slowly yields to a conclusion which is like the memory of a memory.

Also inspired by literature is James Clapperton’swork for string quartet The Great Divorce (1990). Of all the works on the present recording this is perhaps the least connected to the quartet tradition. The four instruments play with mutes throughout, and the dynamic never rises above mp. The dreamlike atmosphere relates to the short book by C.S. Lewis from which the piece takes its name. The ‘great divorce’ is an idea opposed to Blake’s notorious ‘marriage of Heaven and Hell’: for Lewis, as for his mentor George MacDonald – who appears in the book as Virgil to Lewis’s Dante – there can be ‘no heaven with a little of hell in it’. Lewis’s book is an allegory of the afterlife, in which the narrator finds himself travelling with others on a journey out of a grey town. Trapped by the habits and foibles to which they cling, many of his fellow-travellers will not realise that this is Hell, and thus will not escape, but return to that grey place. The atmosphere is of a great melancholy which might lift only when self-realisation is achieved. At the end of Lewis’s book the narrator simply awakes, relieved that death has not visited him on this occasion.

Notes on the music

In the quartet, the four instrumental ‘characters’ progress for the most part independently, with modal melodies appearing and fading again in the general ebb and flow. Scottish traditional music here is viewed from a distance, its dances and laments always heard as if in a dream. They float by; nothing is resolved. But as stylistic allusions they also represent Clapperton’s desire to come to terms with an aspect of his cultural inheritance. In the years preceding the work’s composition, Clapperton had established a reputation as an interpreter of piano music of formidable complexity. As a composer he wished to find a voice which was not simply that of the music he was performing professionally. As a Scottish composer living abroad, furthermore, and feeling unconnected to much of musical life in Scotland at that time – The Great Divorce remained unperformed for twelve years, until it was taken up by Charles Mutter and the Edinburgh Quartet – he found that voice in a more introspective, contemplative style. The music eschews goal-directedness, and like other works by Clapperton the quartet seems not so much to end as simply to stop.

For Judith Weir, folk music has offered, both as a technical and as an expressive model, the possibility of reconnecting with musical traditions beyond modernism: a way of broadening the communicative scope of her music, to which it has brought qualities

including brightness, pithiness, wit and –perhaps most crucially – a sense of the power of understatement. Written in 1990, her String Quartet is unusual for her in using a title which would have been commonplace at any point in the preceding two hundred years. (She has gone on to write piano quartets and piano trios, and has named them as such, but even the predominance of these over string quartets looks like a reversal of traditional chamber-music priorities.) Nevertheless, the Quartet is utterly characteristic of Weir’s style: in its homogeneous ensemble sound, its preference for rhythmic unanimity and for a harmony grounded in the middle to high register; in its songfulness; and in its avoidance of the grand gesture (compared with the standard four-movement structure of a traditional string quartet, Weir’s piece even seems to be missing a finale). In all these ways it may appear distant from the quartet tradition, but in so many other ways – in its sonic beauty, its awareness of a whole world of music, and in its sheer joy in music-making – it can be seen to enrich that tradition.

Each of the three movements is based on a song also by Weir – settings of medieval Spanish romances in the first two movements, and in the third a Scottish ballad. Contemplating the range of playing techniques developed and widely used in late twentieth-century string music, Weir says,

I began to concentrate on bowing itself as a musical phenomenon. And indeed, in this piece, this is a deliberate emphasis on ‘on-the-string’ bowing to the exclusion of everything else – no pizzicato, no spiccato, just bow on string.

It is a mark of the range of musical responses available that by some way the biggest piece on this disc – the closest to the classical tradition in size and in discursiveness – is still not a traditional four-movement form. Indeed, in structural terms William Sweeney’s String Quartet No 3 (2004) may be more radical even than appearances suggest, for its division into three movements disguises an even more continuous distribution of material across the piece’s 35-minute span. ‘I planned the quartet,’ Sweeney writes,

as a large-scale single movement, in which two basic sets of material are continuously alternated in various forms (one mainly slow and the other mainly fast – but not always) and interrupted by solo or duet reflections. When the whole piece was assembled, even I was taken aback by the unrelenting movement back and forth between new material and variants of earlier ideas.

Sweeney therefore introduced breaks in the structure, so that there are now three movements, each beginning, after a pause, with the same gesture that concluded the previous one. The overall shape is as follows:

I: ensemble, viola solo 1, ensemble

II: viola solo 2, ensemble, violin duet 1

III: violin duet 2, ensemble, cello solo, ensemble

The work begins with nebulous chordal shapes, from which melodic phrases slowly emerge. The writing in octaves, a strong feature throughout the piece, contributes to its folk-like flavour. The viola solos contain some references to the viola part of Sweeney’s first string quartet, which was played by Michael Beeston, the Edinburgh Quartet’s longest-serving member, when the Quartet commissioned and premiered the earlier piece in 1981. In the main ensemble passage of the last movement, the repetitions of short rhythmic motifs grow increasingly insistent, before a long cello solo which seems to resolve the emotional conflicts of the piece in preparation for the quasi-fugal sprint to the finish.

Here, structure may seem to be at its most abstract – another ‘classical’ quartet characteristic, especially in a composer whose output otherwise is notable for its eclecticism of style and instrumentation. But Sweeney has also spoken of the incorporation of wild contrasts in terms of an idea propounded by the Scottish poet and thinker Hugh MacDiarmid. And so we return to questions of national character. With his concept of the

Notes on the music

‘Caledonian antisyzygy’, MacDiarmid aimed to counter what he saw as a restrictive conception of Scottish identity, and to capture the true range of the Scots intellectual temperament – to celebrate the opposing and even contradictory forces in the Scottish psyche which constitute its dynamic artistic genius. In the variety and quality of Scottish voices making themselves heard on this recording, MacDiarmid’s project is vindicated.

© John Fallas 2006

John Fallas is a freelance writer and commentator on contemporary music.

commissioning of new music. Having worked closely with Michael Tippett, the Edinburgh Quartet’s recording of Quartet No 1 was selected by the composer for release shortly before his death. Close relationships have been established with some of the most distinguished composers of our time. Indeed, the quartet’s work in this field earned it the first PRS award from the Scottish Society of Composers. Kenneth Leighton and Hans Gál worked intimately with the Edinburgh Quartet in the preparation and performance of their works of which the Quartet has released recordings.

The Edinburgh Quartet is one of the UK’s leading string quartets. Resident at the Ian Tomlin School of Music, Napier University Edinburgh and at Glasgow University, it also plays an important role in the musical activities of the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Founded in 1959 by Professor Sidney Newman, it is one of the UK’s longestestablished university-based quartets.

Its repertoire is firmly rooted in the great classical European tradition of the last three centuries, and it is active in the promotion and

The Edinburgh Quartet

With thanks to Edward Bremner, The Reverend George Whyte, The Scottish Music Centre, David Strudwick, Graeme Strudwick, Alexandra Thompson.

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