Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108592154.003
A. Whittall
ing Narratives Of MacMillan’s three most substantial compositions for string quartet to date, only No. 3 (2007) has no other title. That does not automatically imply an intention to pursue abstraction, to propose and explore ‘purely musical’ matters, rather than to present some kind of narrative with a certain degree of extra-musical content. Even the third quartet could be thought of as ‘telling a story’, about what happens in each of the three movements to the expressive states with which they begin. In the ûrst movement, the initial state urged on the performers – dolce e dolente – is subtly ambiguous, at least if one believes that gentle melancholy might be more apparent than real, and in any case much occurs during the movement’s course to promote an outcome which dissolves around very different material, strepitoso e marcato. From a narrative perspective, the second movement – marked ‘desolate’ at the outset – might be felt to intensify the dolente topos and retreat from gentleness, since the strong contrasts it contains are in the main far from dolce. Then the even slower ûnale (the initial instruction to the players is ‘patiently and painfully slow’) begins with ‘desolate’ reinforced by ‘simply and sadly’ for the ûrst violin’s melodic line, and this time the ûnal dissolution intensiûes rather than resists the melancholy spirit of the opening. A still more speciûc narrative for this music will be suggested later. As a long-standing compositional genre, with a formidably accomplished history extending from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to Bartók, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich and on (to emphasise British contexts) to Robert Simpson, Peter Maxwell Davies, and David Matthews, to name but three, it might be assumed that any composer addressing the genre today can hardly hope to avoid some degree of allusion to such a weighty and 7 MacMillan’s marking from the score. This, and other quoted markings that follow, are taken from James MacMillan, String Quartet No. 3 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2007). 12 ÷÷ÿÿÿø ÷ÿÿ÷÷÷ÿÿ
在麦克米伦迄今为止最重要的三首弦乐四重奏作品中，只有第3号(2007年)没有其他标题。这并不意味着游戏有意追求抽象，提出和探索“纯粹的音乐”问题，而不是呈现某种带有一定程度的音乐以外内容的叙事。甚至第三四重奏也可以被认为是在“讲述一个故事”，讲述三个乐章中每一个都发生了什么，直到它们开始时的表达状态。在第一乐章中，敦促表演者的初始状态——dolce e dolente——是微妙地模棱两可的，至少如果人们相信温和的忧郁可能比真实的更明显，无论如何，在乐章的过程中发生了很多事情，以促进一种结果，这种结果围绕着非常不同的材料，strepitoso e marcato。从叙事的角度来看，第二乐章——一开始标记为“荒凉”——可能会被认为是强化了dolente的主题，从温柔中撤退，因为它所包含的强烈对比主要远离了dolente。然后是更慢的 nale(对演奏者的最初指示是“耐心而痛苦地缓慢”)以“荒凉”开始，接着是“简单而悲伤”，这是最后的溶解加强了，而不是抵制了开头的忧郁精神。稍后将提出对这种音乐的更具体的叙述。作为一种历史悠久的作曲流派，从海顿、莫扎特、贝多芬到Bartók、勋伯格、布里顿、肖斯塔科维奇，再到罗伯特·辛普森、彼得·麦克斯韦尔·戴维斯和大卫·马修斯，仅举三个例子，都有着令人敬畏的成就。人们可能会认为，今天任何作曲家在创作这一流派时，都很难避免在某种程度上提到如此沉重的麦克米伦标记。这句话，以及后面引用的其他标记，摘自詹姆斯·麦克米伦的《第三弦乐四重奏》(伦敦:Boosey & Hawkes, 2007)。12 ÷÷ÿÿÿø ÷ÿÿ÷÷÷ÿÿ
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