Laurence Osborn Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains
for String Quartet
Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains for String Quartet
DURATION 20 minutes
CONTENTS
I - p. 1
II - p. 11
III - p. 18
IV - p. 24
Commissioned by e Wigmore Hall. World première performance given by Solem Quartet at e Wigmore Hall, London, 25th November 2023, as part of ‘Laurence Osborn Day’ at e Wigmore Hall. © 2023 Laurence Osborn
PROGRAMME NOTE
In recent pieces, I have been reaching for a kind of clarity and emotional directness that I hear in the music of certain artists I love, but find impossible to describe using words. It is a quality that only exists temporarily in the act of listening; it cannot be sustained for an entire piece. Maybe I could describe it as a kind of closeness, or rawness, or hotness, or the sensation of being touched through the musical fabric. It emerges in the music of C. P. E. Bach, Schubert, Berlioz, Janáček, and Tippe . I hear it also in Nina Simone’s voice, in Bill Evans’s piano, in J Dilla’s sampling.
Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains is gorgeous parade of images comes from a disparaging definition of Romanticism in the nineteenth-century Parisian newspaper, Le Corsaire, as quoted in David Cairns’s biography of Berlioz. Romanticism is defined as ‘greasy hair growing over the coatcollar’, sighing at least three times a minute’, and ‘dreaming of lakes, mists, bats, daggers, and fountains’. When I read the quotation, that final parade of images reached out and poked me. e images had conspired to rebel against their own glibness and communicate something vivid and fantastical in spite of the intentions of their author.
None of the four movements of Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains have anything to do with lakes, mists, bats, daggers, or fountains.