Description

The first movement deals with anger: anger that stems from pain. That deep, deep hurt, that comes from witnessing suffering to oneself or a loved one: the movement culminates with a “scream” that is inside your head, or that finds its way out: a scream that comes from mental anguish. Much of this movement is, as would be expected, forte, but there are many moments when the sorrow behind the anger shows itself too.

The second movement “- with deep, deep sadness -’” deals with the sorrow behind the anger, opening with a slow, sigh-like, descending motive, which recurs throughout the movement which is in an exceptionally slow tempo, full of sevenths, pulling at our minds like those feelings. Towards the end of the movement, the texture gradually rises and rises, getting more and more intense the higher it becomes, until it finally reiterates the opening sigh. This is how the movement finishes too, this time with “the sigh” played by a quartet, ending with plaintive notes on a solo violin: sorrow to the point of emptiness.

The third movement opens as the second ended, with a solo violin, which is followed by a quartet: empty sorrow, after anger has fled. The anger that caused these feelings plunders in, with material directly from the opening of the first movement, and once again, the rising and shrieking 7ths over a frenzied bass represent the pained anger in the mind. This gives way to a solo, leading into what I describe as “the theme of extreme sadness’, full of pitiful, extremely quiet dissonances; the silent tears we don’t cry?  – the ‘deep, quiet sadness’.  Finally, we are worn out, and whisper through a violin solo. We journey through  ‘feelings of the inevitable’, the feeling of heavy of heart.  Finally, we slide into the quartet section at the end, with “the deep sighing figure” and the whole movement ends, as it began, with a solo violin, and a feeling of empty hopelessness.

General Notes:

This piece represents the anger “at the way, what to one person is of no consequence, while their lack of ‘awareness’ causes another distress”… but no one really bothers or cares. It is also about unnecessary destruction of habitat. It’s about the scream of chain saws removing trees for no reason, taking away from other living creatures: it is about the pain caused by destruction of beauty: it it about a tree in full blossom being reduced to wood shavings; it is about fencing workers hacking down most of an old family rose that was my Mother’s and chucking it onto the riverbank to hide it: it is about me, planting four tiny primroses on some waste, bramble and ivy-ridden ground at the outer edge of memorial garden, and them being pulled up by staff, one in bloom, presumably because unless you are staff, you are not allowed to do such things; this piece is about stupidity and bureaucracy, derailing of common sense, but above all, the derailing of common sense, and all that is in loved-one’s best interests. It is about the anger that surpasses all other anger, that screams inside, wilts, rises, falls and whimpers, causing physical feelings that can only be portrayed in poetry and music, for they are beyond tears…