Borderline - String Quartet No.3
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 15409
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2019
- 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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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Borderline was commissioned by the Villiers Quartet, who asked for a specifically ‘political’ piece, perhaps thinking of Harry’s previous Restraint for Handcuffed Pianist or George Meets Arnie for Tennis. Harry’s response was to include in the quartet the line of the Irish border. Composed a year before the period of repeated defeats of the Theresa May government, the border transcription resists easy assimilation into the work, perhaps reflecting the ‘puzzling’ and ‘contradictory’ qualities Adorno praised in late Beethoven. When the work came to be premiered at a perfromance a year later (in Oxford, June 2019), the presence of the border had taken on a more specific meaning, hinting at the difficulties of Anglo-Irish relations and the position of Northern Ireland in a post-Brexit United Kingdom.
The other significant research prompt in Borderline is its relationship with Beethoven’s Op. 95, ‘Serioso’ Quartet, much as Harry responded to Haydn’s ‘Emperor’ Quartet (and its national anthem slow movement) in his own ‘Empress’ Quartet. On the one hand, Borderline seeks to emulate Op. 95’s ‘brusque tone’ and ‘density of incident’ (Harry), particularly in relation to its incredibly compact and explosive handling of sonata structure, a varied version of which is the formal context the line of the Irish border cuts across. On the other hand, following Robert Simpson, Harry views the coda of of the last movement of op. 95 as a reference to Beethoven’s Egmont music, itself a deeply political piece. This relationship is most obvious in Borderline’s own coda, marked ‘Siegesymphonie’, which transforms the pattern of the ‘monologue’ followed by the subsequent ‘flight / release’ gesture that characterizes the end of the Egmont incidental music, and plays on the two meanings of ‘Siege’ in English and in German (‘Victory’).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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