ABSTRACT:
Quartet stations: the cross and beyond in string quartets by Dillon and Sciarrino
Rather than seeking ‘the musical past in the present’ in the form of quotations or allusions to specific earlier works or composers, this paper begins from the idea that a title such as ‘String Quartet’ or ‘Violin Concerto’ might itself be regarded as a kind of quotation – a quotation of a title that present-day composers and listeners are aware of having encountered many times before. I propose the ‘new music string quartet’ (Albertson, Toop et al., 2013 & 2014) as a privileged site in which such titles, far from their more usual nostalgic or restorative function, simultaneously affirm and deny both the past of the string quartet medium and the more general possibility of reference to established genre categories.
Existing discussions of this repertory tend noticeably to avoid the term ‘genre’, owing partly – I argue – to a confusion over its meaning which recent studies of genre in popular music have only served to exacerbate; partly to a lack of clarity over the ways in which ‘string quartet’ is and is not the name of a genre; and partly to the legacy of a view stretching back through modernism to the nineteenth century in which claims about genericity are perceived (by both composers and listeners) as diluting the strength of the individuated work. I seek to counter this view, while also considering terminology specific to the Scottish composer James Dillon’s own discourse about his music for string quartet: physis, gravitas, chiasmus … The last of these, the idea of the quartet as ‘cross-like’, suggests a link to Salvatore Sciarrino’s use of concepts of ‘the cross’ and ‘the square’ in talking about his quartets, and provides my paper with a final opening-out from Dillon back on to some more general/generic concerns regarding these contemporary ‘stations of the string quartet’.
Keywords: genre, paratexts, contemporary string quartet
BIO: John Fallas is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Leeds, UK. His thesis, supervised by Prof Martin Iddon, is provisionally titled ‘Afterlives of Genre: genre disguised, genre fragmenting, genre living on, 1966–2016’, and is an investigation of the requiem after 1965 and the string quartet after 1980. He has published in Tempo, Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming) and Grove Music Online. He has also worked, since 2006, as a freelance writer specialising in music of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has written booklet notes for over 25 CDs of contemporary music on labels such as NMC, aeon, and harmonia mundi, and for performers including the Arditti Quartet, BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, flautist Matteo Cesari and cellists Séverine Ballon and Arne Deforce. He also works as an editor, specialising in improving English-language work for non-native writers.
