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Stringquartet No.1

This composition is inspired by the haunting poetic beauty of panoramas of sinful mankind depicted by Dutch artist Hiëronymus Bosch.
In his paintings about the Last Judgements, the depiction of Heaven only takes about five percent of the paintings' total space, the rest is left for Hell.

Last Judgement - central pannel

In those 95 percent of space the artist has total freedom to use his imagination to show the horrors of Hell. The terrors of all sorts of disgusting creatures torturing the "fallen men" are shown in an uncensored version to the audience. In his painting The Garden of Delights (ca. 1500) he must have unconsciously been so enraptured by the sensuous appeal of the flesh that the images he coined tend to celebrate what they are meant to condemn. It interests me how in general the evil in existence, the morbidity and wickedness, speaks more to the human imagination than the good.
This stringquartet is composed without any before made plans about structure, form, pitches or whatever parameter. It is written rücksichtslos in an angry-chromatic style. With the sound as a result of mathematic models and systems of Modernism between the ears, the monsters come crawling through the pencil to the five lines on paper. Two years before the final version this resulted in a twenty-minutes piece without a head or tail (actually some of Bosch' monsters don't have this either) with which I was not satisfied; it had no form and so I thought it didn't make sense.
Later the piece was cut into short phrases and gestes which were restructured and new material in the same style was added. The final version of the quartet is built up by over thirty fragments of different sizes (three seconds to half a minute) and characteristics although most of them are agressive and angry characters. Duration of the work is ca 16 minutes.

With this work Edward Top was awarded first prize in the 2003 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award Competition at the University of Illinois, USA.

 

 

Listen HERE to the opening of this work

Copyright © 2003 by Edward Top
Photography by Marten Top. No part of this website may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including printing, photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval) without notification of the authors' name.