Instrumentation: String Quartet

Downloadable sample pages found at the link here.

Modernity doesn’t belong to any particular culture. This string quartet is modern. It was written towards the end of 2008 and into 2009. Superficially it is a record of culture struggling towards modernity. Humans desiring to leave the barbarity of war, fighting, greed, power and destruction yet evidently not entirely sincere on that account. One isn’t ”a little bit” modern. Modernity isn’t warring cultures, religions or genders.

Irony, sarcasm, cynicism (to which I count ”post-modernism“) and other forms of humour come and go, having solved nothing. Modernity demands more: real problem solving - such as feeding the hungry, housing for the poor, and, indeed abolition of both hunger and poverty. We no longer live in feudalism. We are in modernity. And doing poorly. Why compose this piece? A comment on struggling to survive where cooperation was scant to non-existent. No heroism, no triumphant battle - and no civilisation let alone ”modern culture” to speak of. Something like demanding wild plants to flower voluntarily, to provide some kind of untrammelled relief. That was the ”drive” behind this piece, on recollection, end of year 2025.

Dedicated to Simon Reade.