Season 1 starts the year with a celebration of Australian music - with the unique musical languages of Nineteenth Century composers Alfred Hill and Percy Grainger, drawn together by the musical explorations of Tim Dargaville.
In Tim Dargaville’s words:
“These 11 short pieces for string quartet mark the beginning of a collection entitled ‘The Book of Memory and Forgetting’. My reasons for wanting to make these works are complex. A significant impetus has been to remember the life of my mother, and to make sense of her last years in the strange landscape of dementia. Writing this work has also helped me accept the loss of her.
Rosemary Dargaville (1934–2013) was feisty, loving and articulate. A lifelong campaigner for social justice, for her, language was a sophisticated tool for passionate expression of feelings and ideas. With the onset of dementia in the last decade of her life, Rosie gradually lost both her physical mobility and her mastery of words. Perceptions of past and present became increasingly intermingled and her language took strange and often beautiful forms, with sentences disappearing, or disparate thoughts connecting. In her last days Rosie’s need to make contact was expressed through wordless singing, and through interacting with ever-present recorded music. Music was the most important solace for her and music for strings was a particular favourite.
These ‘Lost Pages’ are in remembrance of Rosie. Her life has inspired the creation of music that speaks in unexpected ways – abrupt changes in direction, familiar musical objects in unfamiliar circumstances, gradual disappearances of recognisable traits. Movements I - V of the set are distinct portraits while Movements VI - XI take these same pieces into states of dissolution and disappearance.
I would very much like to thank the members of Ironwood for their commitment to this project, and for the care they have taken in bringing this score to life.”
Composer and violinist, Alfred Hill was born in Australia and raised in New Zealand. Hill’s second string quartet ‘A Maori Legend in Four Scenes’ is one of his better known works, and was premiered by the Austral Quartet in the year it was completed (1911). The four movements capture beautifully the four scenes from the legend, as depicted in Hill’s detailed concert notes:
“In the forest guarded against man by the potency of a Karakia (talisman) grew the giant kauri (a beautiful New Zealand tree), from which Rata, the hero, would fashion the canoe to bear him across unknown seas. Entering the forest as Taniwha (the grim monster) and Kotuku (a beautiful crane) were engaged in deadly combat, Rata felled the tree. That night he dreamt he heard Kotuku's cry for aid. Changing into a beautiful Maiden, she told how the wicked Tohunga (priest) has cast a spell on her and Taniwha was endeavouring to make her reveal the Karakia. She informed Rata that his labours would be in vain unless he knew the magic formula, and promised to teach it to him if he would kill Taniwha. Next day Rata found the kauri waving gloriously again and beneath it lurked Taniwha. Rata boldly slew the monster and in its place stood the lovely maiden of his dream. From her he learned the formula which he recited to Tane (the forest god). As he did so the air became full of the cry of countless birds. Circling the tree they pecked and pecked until it fell, then fashioning it into the noblest canoe that the world has seen. Dedicating it to Tane, the lovers and birds chanted the mystic Karakia, Ki te urunga te waka.”
Percy Grainger’s ‘Molly on the Shore’ was originally composed for string quartet, and explores the textures of two contrasting Irish reels ‘Temple Hill’ and ‘Molly on the Shore’.
Program
Tim Dargaville (b. 1962)
Invisible Dance, followed by:
Lost Pages from The Book of Memory and Forgetting
11 short pieces for string quartet
Alfred Hill (1869–1960)
String Quartet No 2 ‘A Maori Legend in Four Scenes’
The Forest (Allegro Agitato)
The Dream (Adagio)
The Karakia (Scherzo)
The Dedication and Launching of the Canoe (Finale)
Percy Grainger (1882–1961)
‘Molly on the Shore’
Artists
Anna McMichael and Rachael Beesley (violins), Simon Oswell (viola), Danny Yeadon (cello)