Away from the Centre

In 1981 John Casken (b. 1949) wrote his first string quartet – a New McNaghten Concerts commission first performed at St John's Smith Square in February 1982. The confidence of Casken's style is clear from the forcefully articulated contrast between the explosively terse yet already evolving initial idea and relatively restrained, flowing patterns provoking a more confident reassertion of the E-flat unison which provides the initial idea with its cadence (Example 6.1). A cogent, connected process is in train, without padding, yet able to include recognisable repetitions from an early stage as an aid to comprehensibility. The music has an upbeat energy suggesting a commitment to attachment rather than alienation. Moods are not uniformly blithe and optimistic, but the predominant expressive aura is one that can embrace intimations of isolation and regret while keeping expressionistic melancholia at bay.

The quartet, which Casken revised before its publication in 1984, came at the end of a period that had involved study in both Birmingham and Warsaw. For Casken, this contact with an overseas environment – and especially the music of Lutosławski, though he actually studied with Andrzej Dobrowolski – need not have been especially decisive at a time (the early 1970s) when opportunities to hear how young British composers were responding to European and American initiatives were readily available. Nevertheless, the Polish context, like his feeling for the visual arts (he had considered training as a painter) served to enrich and challenge that most basic of creative instincts – knowing one's own place, one's own space. Casken's space is located in a Northern landscape that invites connection, not estrangement. Composers would have to work very hard to avoid any engagement with the interplay of relatively permanent and relatively impermanent elements in their works. But the instinct to keep one's feet on centred ground can configure this trope as a considered resistance to high-flown social and aesthetic utopianism: the centres which hold do so under constant threat of erosion.