The Struggle with Conviction: A Trio of String Quartets

Abstract

ing Narratives Of MacMillan’s three most substantial compositions for string quartet to date, only No. 3 (2007) has no other title. That does not automatically imply an intention to pursue abstraction, to propose and explore ‘purely musical’ matters, rather than to present some kind of narrative with a certain degree of extra-musical content. Even the third quartet could be thought of as ‘telling a story’, about what happens in each of the three movements to the expressive states with which they begin. In the ûrst movement, the initial state urged on the performers – dolce e dolente – is subtly ambiguous, at least if one believes that gentle melancholy might be more apparent than real, and in any case much occurs during the movement’s course to promote an outcome which dissolves around very different material, strepitoso e marcato. From a narrative perspective, the second movement – marked ‘desolate’ at the outset – might be felt to intensify the dolente topos and retreat from gentleness, since the strong contrasts it contains are in the main far from dolce. Then the even slower ûnale (the initial instruction to the players is ‘patiently and painfully slow’) begins with ‘desolate’ reinforced by ‘simply and sadly’ for the ûrst violin’s melodic line, and this time the ûnal dissolution intensiûes rather than resists the melancholy spirit of the opening. A still more speciûc narrative for this music will be suggested later. As a long-standing compositional genre, with a formidably accomplished history extending from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to Bartók, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich and on (to emphasise British contexts) to Robert Simpson, Peter Maxwell Davies, and David Matthews, to name but three, it might be assumed that any composer addressing the genre today can hardly hope to avoid some degree of allusion to such a weighty and 7 MacMillan’s marking from the score. This, and other quoted markings that follow, are taken from James MacMillan, String Quartet No. 3 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2007). 12 ÷÷ÿÿÿø ÷ÿÿ÷÷÷ÿÿ