Commissioned by the Ligeti Quartet, 2017.

Part contemporary string quartet, part theatre piece, part essay about the contemporary string quartet, Singing Strings is also a response to the frequently made observation that a string quartet is ‘like a conversation’ and sees members of the ensemble discuss and debate the particularities of their performance craft, inhabiting a range of colourful personalities (in addition to their own) along the way.

If we listened as outsiders to a group conversation, each of us would hear it differently and not every idea would be clearly discernible to every listener. Likewise, in this piece, ‘word-clouds’ and voice-like string techniques blur the distinction between instrument and voice, creating a network of more or less discernible statements. The players’ musical and semantic conversations – with the audience as well as each other – encapsulate the medium of the sting quartet itself thought-provoking questions to which listeners must find their own individual answers. Sometimes their meaning is clear; sometimes it is hinted; and sometimes it is totally obscure. In this, as in all, communication, different meanings can be extracted from the same statements and multiple different strands entangle.

Singing Strings was commissioned by the Ligeti Quartet with support from the RVW Trust. It was premiered at West Road Concert Hall (Cambridge) and subsequently revised. Since then, it has been performed at the family concert ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ (Dorchester), Birmingham Conservatoire, St Stephen’s (Bristol), and Iklectik (London), in 2017; at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the London Music Masters 10^th Anniversary celebration, in 2018; and at Classical Sheffield (DINA, Sheffield) in 2019.

You can read more about Singing Strings on the Ligeti Quartet website.