String Quartet No.4: Hard Rock Vampyromorph
- Submitting institution
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The University of Manchester
: B - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : B - Music
- Output identifier
- 70316823
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- May
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- 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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B - Music
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This work was commissioned by the Cuarteto Cromano, and premiered in Monterrey and Saltillo, Mexico, in May 2018. Inspired by a photograph of a fossilized vampyromorph – a soft-bodied, boneless creature for whose form surviving fossils preserve only the most reduced outline – the research imperative for this quartet was to convey attenuation as a partially hidden linear process by seeking to apply the concept of misdirection in conjuring as a musical strategy. It was informed by three contrasting research contexts: the conjuring techniques outlined in Derren Brown’s 'Tricks of the Mind' (2006); Schoenberg’s concepts of liquidation, fragmentation, harmonic rhythm and rhythmic density as developed in William Caplin’s 'Classical Form' (1998); and two specific passages in the music of Sibelius – the shift from Scherzo to Adagio at b. 208 of the Seventh Symphony and the opening of 'Pohiola’s Daughter', Op. 49 – where material is made to shift from foreground to background by gradually flattening out its profile.
The work’s methodological innovation lay in applying this process of attenuation repeatedly over successive long stretches of music, employing foreground distraction to achieve musical misdirection: the listener’s attention is drawn away from material placed initially in the foreground by new material that appears against it disruptively such that the initial material shifts into the background and eventually attenuates; meanwhile the new material now in the foreground is itself then made to ‘disappear’ as another diversion is created. Structural continuity thereby results from the overlapping of ideas, while variety is achieved by (1) using vastly different proportions for the various attenuating materials; (2) employing some disrupting materials that do not attenuate, leaving the listener unsure about which materials will develop; and (3) creating a sense of increasing rhythmic continuity as the music progresses.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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