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- Kevin Volans
String Quartet No 2 "Hunting: Gathering" (1987)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Doris and Myron Beigler and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Dedication: Kronos Quartet
Programme Note
When I wrote Hunting: Gathering in 1987 I had grown tired of the ‘composition etude’ - the one-idea piece. I decided to try and write a piece which included as many different musical fragments as possible, strung together in a pseudo-narrative. To keep the fragments separate, each is written in a different key. As I wanted the different pieces to come and go in a random fashion like images or events on an unplanned journey, my principal problem was how to move from one key to another without any sense of development (i.e. without modulating). I was also consciously trying to keep the overall scale of events constant, not allowing one piece to dominate others unduly - rather like viewing everything against a fixed background. Although the piece is in three sections it is conceived as one movement or, more precisely, one journey, and should therefore always be played in its entirety.
SOURCES
In Hunting: Gathering I made reference to many different pieces of music:
ranging from very rough approximations of style to more or less precise transcription. The principal ones are: the first half of the ritornello melody at the beginning of the piece is derived from Maz sa goala (the lyre of the initiates), a piece of the music of the Hamar of South, Ethiopia,there’s a fleeting reference to a variant of the Shona mbira tune Nyamaropa (Zimbabwe) at bar 65; at bar 1-25 a remembered unaccompanied tune sung by two (Xhosa?) girls (I’d lost the original source when I wrote the piece). at bar 162 the style, but not a quote of lesiba music from Lesotho (the lesiba is a single-stringed instrument which is blown!); Malienne kora music at bar 265; and a small set of variations on the piece Muthambe (bar 387f) which was played by a famous 19th century mbira player and medium, Pasipamire, of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. There are also several more private references to Scarlatti, Handel, Stravinsky and my own earlier work. With the exception of the mbira pieces all have been harmonically or melodically altered and, on occasion, combined with one another to suit my purposes.
The piece was commissioned by Doris and Myron Beigler and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for the Kronos Quartet.
SOURCES
In Hunting: Gathering I made reference to many different pieces of music:
ranging from very rough approximations of style to more or less precise transcription. The principal ones are: the first half of the ritornello melody at the beginning of the piece is derived from Maz sa goala (the lyre of the initiates), a piece of the music of the Hamar of South, Ethiopia,there’s a fleeting reference to a variant of the Shona mbira tune Nyamaropa (Zimbabwe) at bar 65; at bar 1-25 a remembered unaccompanied tune sung by two (Xhosa?) girls (I’d lost the original source when I wrote the piece). at bar 162 the style, but not a quote of lesiba music from Lesotho (the lesiba is a single-stringed instrument which is blown!); Malienne kora music at bar 265; and a small set of variations on the piece Muthambe (bar 387f) which was played by a famous 19th century mbira player and medium, Pasipamire, of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. There are also several more private references to Scarlatti, Handel, Stravinsky and my own earlier work. With the exception of the mbira pieces all have been harmonically or melodically altered and, on occasion, combined with one another to suit my purposes.
The piece was commissioned by Doris and Myron Beigler and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for the Kronos Quartet.
Media
Kevin Volans - Hunting: Gathering (1987) (String Quartet No. 2) (No. 1)
Kevin Volans - Hunting: Gathering (1987) (String Quartet No. 2) (No. 2)
Kevin Volans - Hunting: Gathering (1987) (String Quartet No. 2) (No. 3)
Reviews
The Smith Quartet's soulful performance of Hunting: Gathering (1987) underlined the shredded romanticism in Volans's post-minimalist masterpiece, with echoes of Janácek in its bold, sad figures. I mean no disrespect to other percussionists when I say that Axelsson is the most extraordinary drummer I have seen, or to other composers when I say that She who Sleeps with a Small Blanket (1985) and Asanga (1998) are the most extraordinary works: ferocious, lyrical and human.
8th November 2009
The Smith Quartet, long-time advocates, gave expert accounts of White Man Sleeps and its even more attractive immediate successor, Hunting: Gathering.
6th December 2004
Discography
ORIGINS - Works for String Quartet
- LabelMSR Classics
- Catalogue NumberMS1537
- EnsembleKontras Quartet
- Released11th August 2015
Hunting:Gathering
- LabelBlack Box
- Catalogue NumberBBM1069
- EnsembleDuke Quartet
- Released1st April 2002
String Quartets Nos. 2 & 3
- LabelArgo
- Catalogue Number4406872
- EnsembleBalanescu Quartet
- Released1st June 1994
Hunting:Gathering
- LabelNonesuch
- Catalogue Number7559-79253-2
- EnsembleKronos Quartet
- Released1991