B&B
For this unusual commission honouring these special 'soldiers' of music (Guarneri Violin, Stradivarius Violin, Maggini Viola and da Salo Double Bass), I thought about some of the di?erent types of wood that are used in instrument making and how they all have their own particular advantages, originalities and strengths. The woods I chose were maple, ebony, willow, spruce. No string instrument can exist without using at least some of these materials.
A question I was asking myself was, would the wood retain some of the spirit and memory of where it has been, what it has heard, and what it has played in its life? The heart of that idea led me to imagine an inner life and world for these magni?cent instruments and to o?er my own musings on what some of those memories might be if they did happen. The work is in four movements and each is dedicated to one wood. The four instruments (dedicatees) feature in each movement.
In Maple I was strongly drawn to folkloric images. Viola (Maggini) carries the melody ?rst, and I saw the instrument being outdoors, perhaps in a community of gypsies. Eventually all the strings come together in a wild dance that is to be played as fast as possible.
Ebony is a rarer wood and when the great instrument makers were at their peak it was in short supply. When I was thinking about the second movement a tragic baroque aria kept surfacing in my imagination, with the vocal line sometimes only as a memory rather than stated. Eventually I wrote it down.
Willow is often used inside the body of the violin, supporting unseen mechanics and layers. I was thinking of the willow as being like a child in the womb. What does it hear? Perhaps just snippets, glimpses, snatches of the whole sound. In this movement there are many silences as well as garbled or frenzied fragments rolling through the atmosphere. I imagined that when sound is absent from the consciousness inside the 'body' of an instrument, it may still be there in the outside world just unheard and not perceivable in that internal world.
Spruce is strong but pliable and when it is used for the front of an instrument its grains are eye-catching and distinct. There are many repeated motives in the Spruce movement, these motives represent to me the idea of both the durability of such a wood and its role in the unique gorgeousness of these master objects. Later, as the movement shifts and develops I keep coming back to the sense of drive and purpose, the way I envisage these great creators used to work.
Elena Kats-Chernin
"The four movements each speak in a different language, but progressed from one to another in an organic fashion that never disturbed the ear. Individually and collectively, they were superficially appealing yet also intellectually satisfying. The title of the work and its movements - 'Maple', 'Ebony', 'Willow' and 'Spruce' - refer to the materials employed in the construction of string instruments, and throughout the music there was plenty of self-reflexive commentary on the string ensemble as a genre, with tips of the hat to baroque structural forms and orchestration techniques, folk fiddle tropes and modernist fragmentation, culminating in a motoric and stirring tutti finale. This work is a most thoughtful and loving ode to strings, for which Kats-Chernin is to be thanked and congratulated." (Nicholas Young, Bachtrack, 08 Dec 2016)