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John Foulds and the String Quartet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
The Park Lane Group's recent concert series ‘The British String Quartet’ provided a useful conspectus of the various ways in which British composers have tackled the quartet medium; but at the Introductory Symposium on 6 November some members of the public seemed to think the series would have benefitted by the inclusion of more works previous to the year 1960: the quartets of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Van Dieren, Rubbra, and Alan Bush's Dialectic were all mentioned in this regard. One name absent from the discussion—because it is doubtful if the participants had ever heard it, and impossible that they should be familiar with a body of unpublished music that has lain virtually undisturbed since 1939—was that of John Foulds. Yet Foulds was a prolific writer of string quartets; and at least one of them, the Quartetto Intimo of 1931–2, seems to me one of the most exciting essays in the medium ever written by a British composer. Since that work is shortly to be heard in public for the first time, it seems appropriate to direct some attention to the achievement of a composer whose music is only just beginning to emerge from the shadows.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980
References
1 Given by the Medici String Quartet at the Purcell Room on 8, 15, 22 and 29 November, this series featured quartets by Simon Bainbridge, Richard Rodney Bennett, Britten, Delius, Elgar, Goehr, Barry Guy, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Maxwell Davies, Dominic Muldowney, Rawsthorne, Giles Swayne, Tippett and Hugh Wood.
2 On 30 April at Hartlebury Castle, performed by the Endellion String Quartet, as part of the 1980 Bromsgrove Festival. A BBC recording is planned for later in the year.
1 A couple of pages from the viola part of another quaret, otherwise unidentified, adds nothing material to our knowledge.
* Ex.1 correction: first line, last bar, top note—for G read A.
1 As with many Foulds works, it is difficult to put a precise date to this piece. The opus number (not always a reliable guide) would suggest somewhere about 1912, as would the fact that he numbered Aquarelles as No.2 of a series of nine suites for various instrumental combinations which he wrote between 1911 and 1935 under the generic title ‘Music-Pictures’: the third of these can definitely be dated to 1913. But a separate piano version of the last movement, apparently earlier than the quartet setting, carries the confusing designation op. 69; and the handwriting throughout the undated ms. score of Aquarelles suggests a date later than 1914. The terminus post quern is June 1926, when the work was premièred in a BBC broadcast.
1 The parts furnish some evidence of a scratch domestic play-through (by whom and for whose benefit remains obscure) in London in 1945; but otherwise it has remained untouched until put in rehearsal by the Endellion Quartet last autumn.
2 London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1934.
* Ex.3vi correction: bar 6, lower stave—for Eq read Eb.
1 Foulds had a fixation with this title in his later years: he also produced the orchestral Pasquinades Symphoniques (1935). which is really a symphony; another set of 3 Pasquinades for orchestra (1935); Pasquinades for 2 pianos (?1931–5, mostly lost); and a Pasquinade for woodwind quartet (?1936, only sketches survive).