Nicholas Maw's String Quartet

Abstract

The fusion of the textural complexity of ‘Scenes and Arias’ with the simpler procedures of ‘Chamber Music’ which marked Nicholas Maw's opera One Man Show also forms the basis of the language for his most recent work, the String Quartet, which was commissioned for this year's Harlow Festival. If, as in the opera, there is nothing so elaborate texturally as parts of ‘Scenes and Arias’, the formal processes are quite the most subtle and involved in any of the composer's work to date. This is not to say that any obscurity exists, indeed it is possibly the work's greatest achievement that for more than 35 minutes of continuous music the listener always knows where he is in a form which shows so many thematic relations and cross-references. As an adjunct to these methods there are sections and paragraphs which simultaneously perform different functions, and the whole forms a pattern of suggestions ansd statements which is of the utmost intricacy. Similar methods are sometimes to be seen in Sibelius, and this is emphasised by the melodic growth which often governs Maw's thematic connections, but the sheer scale of operations in the quartet makes it something new in this field. Alan Bush's Dialectic, for instance, which argues with similar rigour, occupies only half the time. Furthermore, the Bush and the Sibelius achieve their diversity through virtual monothematicism. Maw needs more material to fill his larger canvas, and this raises the additional problem of relating the different streams of thought thus engendered. The consequent interlocking of sections, together with the necessary anticipations and back references, could only have been achieved with considerable intellectual effort, yet the result is the most natural and musically felt structure Maw has so far conceived.