‘Quartet Black’, will be premiered by the Heath Quartet at the Aldeburgh Festival on Sunday June 25th 2023, at 11:30am.
‘Quartet Black’ is the colour of the piece.
We relate to colours personally and refer to them playfully, often giving them evocative names and connecting them in our minds to objects, scenes, or contexts.
But colours are abstract, created scientifically, manipulated and copied via forensic chemical analysis.
‘Quartet Black’ is similarly abstract, on one level simply analysing how a quartet ‘works’ or what it ‘does’, how these four instruments work together… Yet it is a completely personal statement, by turns lyrical and aggressive, extreme in its harmonic language.
At the conclusion of the work the music fades to a lighter colour blue, like the description of a dawn in The Great Gatsby – ‘blue enough outside to snap off the light.’ It remains suspended there.
More details and bookings here.