Four Quartets, the Movie

On Saturday afternoon (23 May, 4pm) I'll be at The Depot in Lewes, Sussex, to take part in a screening and discussion of Tim Hopkins' film Four Quartets. In his characteristically orginal way, Tim has created a visual counterpoint to a soundtrack composed of four contemporary string quartets (by John Woolrich, myself, Joe Cutler and Helen Grime) played straight through, in their entirety.

I'm a big string quartet fan, but in a concert hall, even I would find an unbroken sequence of four modern quartets a rather dense listen. That really isn't how it feels in the film however, with its constantly flowing succcession of simple painted images and everyday scenes from Paris and South London.

Adding a visual dimension to abstract musical scores (and string quartets tend to be the "abstractest") is an approach with possible pitfalls for the listener. Your aural attention can be annoyingly disturbed by things you don't want to see, perhaps because they're too literal and therefore irrelevant to what you're actually experiencing at the time. Or it might all be too large and pressing for the musical context. I've seen plenty of clunky examples of this when orchestras "interpret" via screens at symphony concerts. But, thanks to the elegance of Tim's visual composition, I've found that the one-hour duration of his film flies by, with its sensitive, separate-but-linked channeling of vision and sound.

PICTURED - Muziekgebouw aan t'IJ, Amsterdam