'Shroud' for string quartet, duration c.25 minutes.
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 48
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Mark-Anthony-Turnage-Shroud/102191
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- 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
- In my string quartets, and particularly Shroud, which is the most extended and structurally ambitious of the three, I am attempting to build a new approach to tonality, wanting to make it fresh and personal while also aiming to work within what is probably an old fashioned goal-directed, and tonal-centered view of what I find exciting, as well as seeking to get as much juice as possible out of each musical idea. However, the evolution of my tonal and harmonic thinking has its own heritage. Over the years I have made a number of changes and adaptations to the fundamental compositional method that I established early on in my career when my teacher, Oliver Knussen, introduced me to a form of serial chord rotation derived from processes evident in the later work of Stravinsky. I have added my own elaborations of this, including the addition of jazz chords, often with individual notes omitted to create ambiguity and perhaps disrupt any sense of predictability. In this work, however, I have set out specifically to address the melodic and the tonal, to see it as distinct from harmony (rather than simply the surface of it) and transform melodic lines as they engage with what might be an otherwise divergent harmonic structure (a process I have identified in the work of Andriessen). I have then gone on to form structural blocks out of that material, which become fundamental, are repeated, and retain their identity, if with constant change and alteration (something I owe to the later work of Tippett which continues to impress and influence me). There is almost no medium more intimidating than the string quartet, with its weighty heritage. While I have to accept this tradition, I also need to confront and to transform it, but on my own terms.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -