A Parcel of Airs

First performance:
Salomé Quartet
Collyer-Ferguson Hall, Canterbury
16 September 2021

Duration:
11 minutes

Video Link:
vimeo.com/630874546

Image:
Mick Williamson

Programme note:
For several years John Woolrich has been patiently turning wood, fashioning from the bodies of violin, viola and cello two dozen short quartets. Or perhaps, since he is consciously gathering them into a book of inventions, we can think of them as a mega-quartet, a continuous project of fascination with this hallowed medium. We might imagine that each ten-minute piece, when given life in a space, occupies its own parcel of air. Each might indeed have carried the title of this one, since as ever Woolrich has applied his label after the fact.

To conjure their music from gut and wood, the players must apply pressure, and Woolrich here has added his own; there are knots in this wood, a near-constant beat of dissonance which disrupts the grain and spews fragments of melody up or down. Different kinds of compression produce different effects. This thorny material is being turned in the hand, and sometimes we catch a second or third view of something we recognise. At times it is close to us, at others as if seen from a distance. It is the composer’s own fascination with his journey which provides our own.

Stephen Newbould