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Robert Simpson's ‘New Way’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Lionel Pike
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Extract

The Recently Issued Recording of Simpson's Eighth String Quartet has given us an opportunity to examine a change in that composer's approach to large-scale form. He himself mentioned this ‘new way’—without using such a Beethovenian expression—in a BBC Radio 3 discussion with Michael Oliver, on 6 November 1982:

In earlier times I was interested in large-scale tonality, large areas of tonality: but now I'm trying to find what intervals themselves can generate, using the resonances inherent in simple intervals like the fifth, the fourth or the third. I try to generate something from that by feeling it in a novel way, by approaching the interval of a fifth as if I had never heard it before, and trying to find what can happen—or by using intervals against each other. Take two intervals, the second and the fifth; then you have a combination of intervals and you can use them in different ways against each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 153 , June 1985 , pp. 20 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Hyperion A 66117.

2 An idea followed up by Simpson again in the Finale of his Ninth String Quartet, also recently recorded by the Delmé (Hyperion A 66127).

3 The Seventh String Quartet had also dealt with the possibilities of the perfect fifth, but in an entirely different way from that discussed here.

4 Though it is true that the passage is based on E, not on D#, at the repeat of the Scherzo. This transposition upward by a semitone is not without significance, as will be clear later.

5 It is preceded by an octave G#, which perhaps recalls the key of the Scherzo.

6 The process had been foreshadowed in bar 38 of the movement.

7 The passage recurs, with some changes, from bar 258 to bar 265.

8 I am grateful to Bernard Jacobson for pointing out that E is also a fifth down from A#, just as F (in the context of a hypothetical extra movement suggested earlier in this article) is a fifth up from it. This is yet another case of intervals being mirrored in upwards and downwards directions in this quartet.

9 This may recall bars 189–194 of the third movement.