Anon (2020)
from 'A Room of Her Own' (third movement)
8 minutes
for string quartet
Commissioned by the University of Adelaide with the support of the John Bishop Memorial Commission.
First performance by the Australian String Quartet at Elder Hall, October 17th 2020.
'A Room of Her Own' was the winner of the APRA/AMCOS and Australian Music centre Art Music Award for Chamber Work of the Year in 2021, along with the Albert H Maggs Prize for Composition.
from 'A Room of Her Own' (third movement)
8 minutes
for string quartet
Commissioned by the University of Adelaide with the support of the John Bishop Memorial Commission.
First performance by the Australian String Quartet at Elder Hall, October 17th 2020.
'A Room of Her Own' was the winner of the APRA/AMCOS and Australian Music centre Art Music Award for Chamber Work of the Year in 2021, along with the Albert H Maggs Prize for Composition.
Anon is the third movement of my string quartet A Room of Her Own, a four-movement work that acts as an essay and personal reflection upon the requirements for prosperous creativity. In it, I explore the delicate balance between the realm of the creator and the work being created, taking inspiration from quotes gathered from Virginia Woolf’s seminal text ‘A Room of One’s Own’.
Anon is an investigation of the quote "I would venture to guess that Anon... was often a woman." In the full string quartet, the second movement Epigraph presents, fragments, and then disintegrates themes by Margaret Sutherland, Clara Schumann, and Rebecca Clarke. Anon knits them back together again in a quasi-Sonata form- a musical form historically considered to belong to ‘serious’ music, and thus the domain of men. The music is stubborn and persistent, bordering on aggressive and hostile, but also tender, bittersweet, and startingly alive.
The complete string quartet has a duration of 28 minutes and is performed attacca (without pause between movements). The movements and their text inspiration, where appropriate, are as follows:
I. Web "...imaginative work (is) like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
II. Epigraph
III. Anon "I would venture to guess that Anon... was often a woman."
IV. Incandescence "The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in (her), must be incandescent.... There must be no obstacle in it."
© Anne Cawrse, 2020
Anon is an investigation of the quote "I would venture to guess that Anon... was often a woman." In the full string quartet, the second movement Epigraph presents, fragments, and then disintegrates themes by Margaret Sutherland, Clara Schumann, and Rebecca Clarke. Anon knits them back together again in a quasi-Sonata form- a musical form historically considered to belong to ‘serious’ music, and thus the domain of men. The music is stubborn and persistent, bordering on aggressive and hostile, but also tender, bittersweet, and startingly alive.
The complete string quartet has a duration of 28 minutes and is performed attacca (without pause between movements). The movements and their text inspiration, where appropriate, are as follows:
I. Web "...imaginative work (is) like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
II. Epigraph
III. Anon "I would venture to guess that Anon... was often a woman."
IV. Incandescence "The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in (her), must be incandescent.... There must be no obstacle in it."
© Anne Cawrse, 2020