What fuelled Britten’s art-making, and how did he use the string quartet to express his most personal thoughts?
Australian String Quartet musicians Dale, Francesca, Chris and Michael talk about Britten and how he might have used his lived experience to create utterly unique soundworlds.
Featuring Australian String Quartet musicians:
Dale Barltrop | violin
Francesca Hiew | violin
Chris Cartlidge | viola
Michael Dahlenburg | cello
Sam Jozeps | host
Title music produced by Adam Page
Sampler track by Bob Jarvis
Edited and produced by Sam Jozeps
Narration recorded by Mitre Khammash
Interviews recorded on tour on Gadigal Country, Sydney, NSW
Produced on Kaurna Country at the University of Adelaide, SA
Inner Voices with the Australian String Quartet is generously supported by the Thyne Reid Foundation.
SAMPLER PRODUCED BY BOB JARVIS
For every episode of Inner Voices with the Australian String Quartet, we commission and feature a new piece of music created with samples from that episode’s subject. This episode’s sampler was created by Bob Jarvis.
Bob creates interactive and temporal artworks that integrate music, animation, code, and text. Out of their experimental process emerge themes of intermodality, colour, polyrhythm, flight, ontology, belief, and kinaesthetics.
Selected creative output includes Belief System, a 120-channel spatial audio installation touring internationally with Ranters Theatre, and shortlisted for The Blake Art Prize; Luminesce, a live, audio-visual collaboration with vocalist Gian Slater which won The International Visual Music Award in Frankfurt in 2015; and the practice-led research work Aileron One, a world-first integration of performance technology and full-sized aircraft enabling music to be performed via the expressive medium of gliding flight.
Alongside their creative output Bob works as Director of Technology for Melbourne interactive arts company Playable Streets, contributes to open source software projects, lectures at several universities, and consults as a certified trainer in the Max multimedia programming environment.
“In approaching the sound design, one moment of the quartet reminded me strongly of an aeolian harp – a stringed instrument played by wind.
I had been exploring weather-powered instruments recently and used this as a thematic tie for the selection of sonic elements: water, bird song, wind chimes. I imagine the old upright piano as having been subjected to these same elements, perhaps having been left in a paddock for a few years.”
