Unfold: Australian String Quartets of the 1960s and 1970s
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Academy of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- RAM036
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Aldbury Parish Church, Hertfordshire
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
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- Year of first performance
- 2015
- 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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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This disc was researched and produced in collaboration with Michael Hooper of the University of New South Wales. The aim was to (re)create a ‘lost or missing portrait’ of the distinctive approaches to modernism explored by Australian composers in that period. (A very different aesthetic held sway after 1975.) The issues explored in the preparation of the disc, for which we used manuscript and draft versions in addition to final published material, formed part of the research process for Hooper’s monograph Australian Music and Modernism 1960-1975 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
The Meale and Werder quartets are recorded here for the first time. With no established performance practice, devising a performance strategy for these two previously unrecorded pieces presented a number of challenges. These quartets are only presented in score and the nature of musical co-ordination is complex. In particular, the Werder quartet is semi-legible by intention: the score is part collage, including, for example, tempo instructions cut out of Walton’s Cello Concerto.
A key aim of the project was to explore the Butterley and Banks quartets in the context of a detailed performing knowledge of Tippett and Gerhard respectively. (The Kreutzer Quartet made a Tippett cycle in the 1990s, and the first recordings of Gerhard’s two quartets.)
The two Banks pieces, which are better known, frame the other compositions. The extended cello piece, Sequence, is a vital component of this research output. Hooper and Heyde worked closely with Banks’s sketches and workshop notes, and this recording presents a new version of both the rhythmic profile of the piece and many of the extended-technique passages as a consequence. The overall duration of the programme necessitated the issue of Sequence as a separate download (also available on streaming platforms).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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