- Piers Hellawell
The Still Dancers
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
Commissioned by Britten String Quartet with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Premiere: 6 March 1992, St. George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol, The Britten String Quartet.Recording: Inside Story, Metronome 2002, Met CD 1059, RTE Vanbrugh Quartet. The work’s unusual layout – each of the three pieces being preceded by a short introduction, using exploratory sound-worlds – is prophetic of Hellawell’s musical structures ever since, in which smaller and larger movements are juxtaposed.
Programme Note
The Still Dancers was commissioned by the Britten String Quartet with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was premiered by them in St George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol at a series during 1993.
The composer writes: “This, my first quartet, was written in 1992, and is among my largest works for chamber ensemble. The piece’s unusual layout – each of the three pieces is preceded by a short introduction using exploratory sound-worlds – is prophetic of my musical structures ever since: numerous of my works, in different ways, have since concerned themselves with its ‘archipelago’ patchwork of main pieces and interspersed interludes or introductory sections. The Britten String Quartet fully embraced its experimental elements, premiering each movement separately during their season in St George’s before presenting the whole piece, and later trying different orderings of the pieces.
My ideal deployment of the three pieces was always that they be separated in a programme by other music, though more usually they have been played as a sequence. Breaking up my set of movements might seem radical, but I was keen at the time to equate the separate pieces in my works with sculptures in an exhibition – free-standing, though stylistically related; interspersing other music between them was thus a logical extension of that idea.”
The dancers of the titles are not human; the starting point for each piece was a natural phenomenon, formed by movement but now apparently static. For piece i), Hellawell had in mind the stunted trees on Scotland’s south-west shores, bent double by relentless wind into a permanent, cowed position; this is reflected musically in unceasing rhythmic motion that, by being constant, becomes a kind of stasis, through a series of texture variations. Piece ii) draws on the lichen blotches on rock surfaces that often feature in the composer’s own photographs: it presents, accordingly, a series of sharply contrasted musical blocks. Piece iii) originated with a cloud-scape seen from a plane – a vista in constant flux yet apparently frozen; like piece i) it flows continuously, though gradually filling out in harmonic richness. The introductory ‘invocations’ to all three pieces make use of hardware items that open the door to very particular sound-worlds.
Piers Hellawell 2016
Scores
Discography
More Info
- Piers Hellawell Composer-In-Residence at Winchester Chamber Music Festival
- 1st May 2024
- Piers Hellawell as Composer-In-Residence at Winchester Chamber Music Festival 2024