Anne Cawrse: A Room of Her Own

PROGRAM NOTES

A Room of Her Own is my essay and personal reflection upon the requirements for prosperous creativity. In it, I explore the delicate balance between the realm of the creator and the work being created, taking inspiration from quotes gathered from Virginia Woolf’s seminal text ‘A Room of One’s Own’.

The work is in four movements, played attacca (without pause):

I. Web
“…imaginative work (is) like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

II. Epigraph

III. Anon
“I would venture to guess that Anon… was often a woman.”

IV. Incandescence
“The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in (her), must be incandescent…. There must be no obstacle in it.”

The music opens with Web, a fragile meditation performed by solo cello, accompanied by an off-stage ‘choir’ of bowed crotales. In Epigraph, the off-stage performers return and introduce us to musical themes by composers Margaret Sutherland, Clara Schumann and Rebecca Clarke. These themes then become the primary musical material for Anon, an aggressive and hostile, but occasionally tender homage to forgotten voices of the musical canon. A poignant viola solo announces Incandescence: a hymn to self-awareness, acceptance, and vulnerability.

Anne Cawrse

Further details can be found at www.annecawrse.com/blog