Memory is the seamstress (string quartet no. 3)
- Submitting institution
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University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2834
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- 'Memory is the seamstress' is the second of two commissions Thurlow received from 'Woolf and Music'. It was premiered in Cambridge by the Kreutzer Quartet on 3 November 2016. Funded with an AHRC Cultural Engagement grant, this project explored the role of music in the lives and legacies of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group through varied activities and outputs.
The brief was for an instrumental work responding to Woolf's writing, her lifelong engagement with music, and the challenges of her thought. Woolf's intense interest in the string quartet dictated the choice of medium, and Thurlow selected a passage from 'Orlando' which performs a radical unravelling of the idea that a person is animated by a singular and coherent consciousness. The research problem faced by Thurlow was how to capture in music the playful wit and deft complexity conveyed by Woolf: such a balance is elusive in any medium, especially a non-verbal instrumental one. Accordingly, the piece marshals distinct musical forces to evince six contrasting perceptions: amalgams of touch, scent, image, emotion and thought, expanding each to 2-3 minutes. In the fourth movement, for example, simple harmonies vanish but are continually reconfigured, bringing the evanescence of sound and of musical utterance into the foreground of the musical experience, thereby channelling Woolf’s unique aesthetic.
Re-examining from a 21st century perspective and through the lens of Woolf's writing Schlegel's claim that a person "does not exist as a whole, but only in parts", 'Memory is the seamstress' employs musical techniques to convey the irreconcilable diversity of successive perceptions in the everyday experience of consciousness.
Since its composition in 2016 the work has been presented by three different ensembles (the Kreutzer, Younger and Ligeti Quartets) in five concerts in Cambridge, Bath, Oxford, St Andrews, and via live-streaming.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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