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Heath Quartet

Posted on 28 May 2008

Some mediums are clearly harder to write for than others; for me, the String Quartet is probably the hardest of them all. I know many composers feel the same, for a mixture of reasons -

for composer who like colour (tick) the palette is extremely limited, especially as post-Bartok, almost (note **almost**!) any unusual colour you can think of has been done to the point of cliche

all four instruments demand, I mean really demand, equal treatment. For composers who like a healthy dose of um-cha (tick) or walking-bass (tick) the danger of having your cellist walking out on you are very real - more than that, using the cello as a bass instrument in this way really doesn't sound that great most of the time. It's not without reason that interplay and discussion of four equal partners has become the definition of a good quartet

historically, at least since Haydn's time, composers have written their most intellectual music for the medium. There's a huge weight of history bearing down on you shouting 'WRITE GREAT MUSIC ONLY FOR ME'. Indeed, a violinist in a quartet I worked with recently told me he saw it as his mission as a quartet player to 'save high art' - Yikes! I'm scared!

As far as this last point goes, I love intellectual music - Berg is one of my favourite composers - but I think it was something of a coming of age for me when I realised I'm not really an intellectual composer. I think as soon as I started writing operas I realised I was much more interested in, well, whatever the opposite of intellectual music is - music that's just music, music that moves you in some way, makes you dance, sing, cry, whatever. At least for now I think that's much more what I need to focus on.

So, earlier in the year Lake District Summer Music Festival commissioned a quartet from me for this year's festival, to be played by the exciting young Heath Quartet (pitcured above). After quaking in my boots for some months, when I finally got down to work on the piece it went really surprisingly smoothly. The key decision for me was that these would be a series of 'dances' in the Baroque sense. They would start in one place, explore the possibilities therein and stop. No Beethovenian developments, no 'musical philosophising' if you like. And that did the trick. I wrote five dances, each about 3-4 minutes long, and I'm really excited to hear them at the festival in August. They're called Dances for Oskar.

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