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- Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen
The Extinguishable, String Quartet no. 7 (2014)
- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
Programme Note
The title “The Extinguishable” relates to the fact that it was because of Carl Nielsen (who gave his Fourth Symphony the by-name “The Inextinguishable”) that I met The Danish String Quartet.
In 2011 we were both awarded the Carl Nielsen Prize, instituted on the basis of revenues from Carl Nielsen’s works. I gave his poetic title a morbid twist, since I am not convinced that either life or music is inextinguishable, and that was originally Carl Nielsen’s idea with his title. That lack of conviction is one of the most fundamental things in my perspective, as a human being and as a composer.
Perhaps both life and music are ‘extinguishable’, perhaps not. The thought was a particularly strong background radiation at the time when I wrote the new quartet and it crept into all aspects of its formulation, both technical and sculptural: in the conception of a music of memory – that something is both familiar and unknown at the same time and thus both has something in it that is dead and something that is alive.
In the introductory portrait of four music types running in parallel (like four courses of life) the life of the four music types is constantly interrupted at various points in their progress, and always leaves one of the types alone until this last course of life too is cut off. There are passages in the piece where the music does not refer to such a meta-layer, but is itself. And thus the perspective shifts now and then to being either ‘in harmony with oneself’; perhaps one could say ‘without ulterior motives’ - or referring to the past or to ideas; perhaps comparable to living either in the past of ‘with ulterior motives’.
In 2011 we were both awarded the Carl Nielsen Prize, instituted on the basis of revenues from Carl Nielsen’s works. I gave his poetic title a morbid twist, since I am not convinced that either life or music is inextinguishable, and that was originally Carl Nielsen’s idea with his title. That lack of conviction is one of the most fundamental things in my perspective, as a human being and as a composer.
Perhaps both life and music are ‘extinguishable’, perhaps not. The thought was a particularly strong background radiation at the time when I wrote the new quartet and it crept into all aspects of its formulation, both technical and sculptural: in the conception of a music of memory – that something is both familiar and unknown at the same time and thus both has something in it that is dead and something that is alive.
In the introductory portrait of four music types running in parallel (like four courses of life) the life of the four music types is constantly interrupted at various points in their progress, and always leaves one of the types alone until this last course of life too is cut off. There are passages in the piece where the music does not refer to such a meta-layer, but is itself. And thus the perspective shifts now and then to being either ‘in harmony with oneself’; perhaps one could say ‘without ulterior motives’ - or referring to the past or to ideas; perhaps comparable to living either in the past of ‘with ulterior motives’.