Performed by Red Abbey Quartet

West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry, Cork

6 July 2018

 

Winner of the 2018 West Cork Music Composition Prize

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The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty.

 

Derek Jarman

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Inspired by Derek Jarman’s film Blue, this piece for string quartet is an exploration of colour, what that means with regard to the musical material both historically and now, and why. Made while he was dying from AIDS-related illness, the visuals of Jarman’s film consist solely of an ultramarine blue screen—a reproduction of Yves Klein’s ‘monochromatic proposition’, IKB 79, which in turn forms the cover of my score.

 

Over the course of the seven musical fragments, I variously seek to stare into and perhaps through Jarman’s eyes, his own vision disappearing due to cytomegalovirus retinitis; to stare into the dismembered face of Anton Webern, whose conclusive influence on the self and form in music looms large in this work; to stare into the blue.