BARRY CONYNGHAM

String Quartet 2 (1999), Barry Conyngham

A note

‘For me, chamber music is often about personalities, musical or otherwise. This is particularly true of the String Quartet. While the four instruments together are regarded by many as the pinnacle of blend and match, the ensemble is also capable of great contrasts, and is easily able to create multiple strands, expressing very different musical gestures simultaneously.

Here is an opportunity to explore, through four simultaneous voices, a number of the things that have preoccupied me for much of my creative life: the characteristics that make us “Australian”. For me this involves three notions; the way we contemplate and react to both urban and country landscapes; the struggle between individual and environment; the quest for identity through isolation and sentiment.

So during the composition of this work, as I worked in the Hotel overlooking the ‘dig’ at Paphos, I thought of the music as a discussion or argument about being Australian, even flirted with the idea that the piece could be subtitled “the meeting”. For at one level, the piece is a meeting of four personalities, each reflecting an Australian set of attitudes, behavior, emotional make-up, age and even location.

Mostly, the personalities reside in their own instrument but each takes on some of the characteristics of the others as the encounter unfolds.

The work is in six sections. 

Section 1. Opening encounters, exposure of the material, some clashes, some accommodation, unity and diversity expressed.

Section 2. First Violin dominates. Nostalgic, sentimental, innocent, even naive, but beguiling and wins many friends. Loves atmosphere, reaches out, aspires. New to the city.  A maturing person.

Section 3.  Second Violin. Insistent, simple, basic, energetic, aggressive. Excites and colonises. Often not very much to say, but allows others to develop and bring out ideas and feelings. Dramatic and somehow tropical. A young person.

Section 4. Viola. Elusive, fast, a leader of a tight flashing ensemble. Capable of transformation, but sometimes too skittish, changeable. Full of color. Memories of the outback. A person in their prime!

Section 5. Cello. Passionate, brooding, even surly. Overpowering, sometimes dark and impenetrable, tending to melancholy. The forests, rich in texture and implication. Dusk. A person towards the end of life.

Section 6. Final statements, recollections. A common theme within the diversity.’

- Barry Conyngham, 2021.