Sepia Fragments (2009)
duration 13:00
string quartet
This work was co-commissioned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the St. Lawrence String Quartet by The Huckabone Family and CBC Radio
Imagine the colouration of a picture to sepia tones as a clock reverses on itself. Time is turned back where memories are the most distant and faded. Sepia Fragments is, in a way, a collage. It is an experiment in juxtaposing divergent material through variation form. The opening features a slow and original fiddle tune from the present. Fragments of harmonics and trills – fleeting, darting – accompany the melody. A reel begins in 5/8 time as the music becomes more animated. We encounter abstracted quotations from Schumann, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, transformed and unrecognizable. A quasi-folk melody sounds before chaos ensues and memories fade. Dissonant material is introduced. The music builds several times before it finally gives up. What remains is slow and introspective – a chorale-like ending, the first violin hinting at remembrances from the near and distant past. The closing becomes a transformation of the opening. Fading from nothing... to nothing.
I want to thank the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet for this wonderful opportunity, and I congratulate them on their twentieth anniversary!
I particularly want to thank the Huckabone Family for their generous contribution and support of this new work.
Purchase the CD
SEA TO SEA
St. Lawrence String Quartet
Various
2010 Centrediscs / Centredisques
CMCCD 16310
Includes “Sepia Fragments” by Derek Charke plus works by Brian Current, Suzanne Hérbert-Tremblay, Marcus Goddard and Elizabeth Raum.
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