Richard Meale: String Quartet No 2 (1980) - Scherzo Ruvido

Abstract

"In 1979, when the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra gave the first pe1formance of Richard Meale's Viridian, it was clear that a change had taken place in the composer's musical expression. It was the first premrere of a new work by Meale since 1975, and few were prepared for its luxuriant tonal harmonies and seductive orchestration. The only clue to Meale's changing compositional attitudes during this fom year hiatus came in an article Meale published in the Dunstan Government's short-lived cultural magazine, Vantage. Meale's article gives an insight into his strengthening appreciation of the diversity of human experience, the importance of emotion and individuality, and the natural forces of growth and verdure. These are feelings to which Meale gives direct musical expression in Viridian. In retrospect, Viridian must also be seen as a continuation and consolidation of the musrcal concerns of the earlier works Evocations and Very High Kings, with their colouristic and sensually evocative explorations. Viridian, however, marks the beginning of a new phase of compositional confidence and liberalism in Meale's work. The String Quartet No. 2 provides an even more startling expression of these qualities. The quartet goes further in repudiating the stylistic and academic hegemony of international Modernism, and contrasts sharply with the composer's String Quartet No. 1 of 1975. In the later quartet, Meale chose to avoid the 'artificial' string techniques and sounds, the spatiotemporal notation, the aleatoric tropes, the sparseness and rhythmlessness of the first quartet in favour of a more traditionally based method and expression. As a consequence, the musical development of the String Quartet No. 2 is generated from melody, regular rhythm and tonality, all represented with the relatively greater immediacy of traditional notation. Meale' s choice of these means was prescribed by the emotional motivations which underpin the composition. As well as its expression of the sense of pleasurable vitality which extends from the same musical concerns as Viridian, the second quartet also responds to the composer's grief at the early death of a close friend. Meale's response, however, locates the more positive or hopeful sentiments in this experience, becoming a contemplation of peace and tranquillity, rather than a mourning. Where the first quartet is a work of isolation, especially symbolised in the independence and randomness of the instrumental parts in the second movement (subtitled 'far away'), the second quartet is an act of embracement. Immediacy and nostalgia are the characteristics which distinguish the peaceful sentiments of the second quartet's final movement from that of the first. With the shocking •anachronism' of the second quartet Meale, ever the extremist, was served notice by the overseers of Modernism's hegemony that he had overstepped the boundaries of acceptability. Such remarks had been directed at Meale before, of course, but now the attack came trom the Modernist establishment, whic had presumed Meale to be one of its chief guardians. A composer colleague ventured to suggest that Meale had gone 'too far' this time, and others decried what they saw as Meale's 'softening'! What began as a personal imperative of finding the most appropriate means with which to achieve the expression he sought, became a rejection of 'the tyranny of such "progressive" postulates as "Works like this or that cannot be written, composed, etc., these days"' (as Ferenc Feher describes it). Meale became a composer at the vanguard. of 'post-Modernism'. In subsequent years Meale has maintained and developed this attitude of compositional liberalism. It has permitted an expanded repertoire of compositional language and means for the expression of an expanded range of emotional and dramatic representations. The surpassing of Modernist dogmas enabled Meale to approach the string quartet form again, with refreshment, and subsequently to undertake his first opera, Voss. With the commencement ofMeale's career as a composer of opera, his compositional achievement strikes out into new directions." -- James Koehne Show more